The Challenge Of Growth In Lewis Carroll’s Alice

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CONTENTS

ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. LEWIS CARROLL’S WORLDVIEW IN THE CONTEXT OF VICTORIAN AGE

1.1 Victorian age influence over literature 

1.2 Child status in Victorian age and its reflection in literature

1.3 Lewis Carroll’s profile and literary success
1.4 Paradox, fantasy and ideology in Lewis Carroll books

CHAPTER 2. THE CHALLENGE TO MOVE FROM THE REAL WORLD TO THE IMAGINARY SIDE

2.1 Reflection of reality through the eyes of a child

2.2 Language games and symbolic elements

2.3 Experience challenge through the eyes of Alice

2.4 Symbolic value of characters as human typologies

CHAPTER 3. GROWTH- A TRANSITION FROM CHILDHOOD TO MATURITY

3.1 Challenging Victorian girlhood in Lewis Carroll fairy tales

3.2The rabbit hole- a journey in a single direction

3.3 The matter’s ascent and compulsion

3.4 Alice’s survival in the confusing world of adults

CONCLUSION
REFERENCE LIST

INTRODUCTION

In Victorian period, literature was marked by an example of a popular form, respectively the historical novel. In this situation, recent history is presented by the Brontësisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily. They wrote notable works of the period, but these work were not immediately appreciated by critics of that time. In terms of children's literature, the Victorian age is assigned with the title of “inventing childhood”, a title accounted for certain efforts in stopping child labour and in introducing mandatory education. The literature for children became a growing industry as younger ones were able to read. This way, there were established authors who wrote works designed to educate children, a good example in this situation being “A Child's History of England” written by Charles Dickens. There was also established a group of authors dedicated to children. In this category, the most famous writers were Lewis Carroll, Anna Sewell and R. M. Ballantyne. A popular form of child literature was represented by the nonsense verse and nursery rhymes, a type of poetry which required a childlike interest, a representative author being Lewis Carroll.

This paper is divided into three chapters,each of them presenting esential aspects of both Victorian literature and Lewis Carroll’s work. In this respect, the study begins with an introduction in Lewis Carroll’s worldview in the context of Victorian age, emphasizing the influence of Victorian age over literature, as well as child status in this period and the way it is reflected in different literary operas. During the Victorian age, children were regimented in a harsh manner. In those times, various memorising techniques were very important for the optimum development of the learning process. It was a learning method developed by Puritans as a means for children religious instruction. Ironically, in Victorian literature, the figure of the child was treated as a commodity and the cult of the child was understood in terms of labour, as well as education, and performance, depending on the social class they belonged to. . Dowson wrote the sonnet “Of a Little Girl” in order to emphasize the charms of a young girl. Some people did not consider childhood as a state of hurry towards adulthood some of the authors celebrating childhood through different art composition such as texts or images. This first chapter also treats aspects related to Carroll’s profile and literary success, highlighting the paradox, fantasy and ideology in his books.

Carroll composed several plays, scripts, poems and sketches in order to publish them in the magazines he owned. Usually he was attracted by satire, eventually satirizing his own disability, the stammering. Making a selection of Lewis Carroll literary works, the most interesting bibliography may be represented by poems comprised in Further Nonsense Verse and Prose  published in 1926, The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll  published in 1982 or The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll  published in 1960. With respect to prose, the most impressive works of Lewis Carroll were represented by A Tangled Tale published in 1885, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865 and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, published in 1872. Aspects related to mathematics and logic, as well as photography, eating habits, sleeping difficulties, ignored childhood, dual personality, or lifestyle in Victorian age are certain features of Lewis Carroll’s life, being reflected in his literary work, mainly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the most famous tale for children. It is a novel addressed to both children and adults, considered by critics to have a correlation in nonsense literature, while in others’ opinion, it is an extremely moralistic tale for children. In this regard, many readers of Christian religion considered this novel to be one of the best pieces of moral literature, giving to Lewis Carroll the status of a veritable Christian writer.

Carroll’s books reflect morality aspects as well as different children responsibilities. In this respect, ideology about morality, life, tradition or childhood is challenged in his literary art. Carroll is sophisticated due to the fact that he has the capacity to create unknown realms, fantasy worlds where readers could identify themselves through wonderful characters. Fantasy is supported in Carroll’s books by the idea of transition, paradox between real and fantastic being amplified by the specificity of unusual rules. Through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are two novels where the protagonist’s journey is an adventurous one. Also, transition is illustrated by the passage from a stage of child to an adult one ( rather path of adulthood). Dreams are considered to be elements of transition in Carroll’s books but they also are environments where Alice experiences many life stages. In his Alice bookss, the author tries to outline a society intending to achieve the perfection, but ends in being unpredictable and absurd as the imagination of a child is.

The second chapter analyzes the challenge to move from the real world to the imaginary side, highlighting a reflection of reality through the eyes of a child, along with the experience’s challenge, supported by language games and symbolic elements and symbolic value of characters as human typologies. In Carroll’s books, reality is reflected through the eyes of Alice, the girl resembling the British people because she is able to evoke traditional.

Also, regardin the rules of the two fantastic worlds, Alice attempts ot comply with themn until she defies them. She seeks rules under the image of guidance in the moments she is in trouble. One believed that Alice was tolerant from the social point of view until things were directed towards a complete and utter nonsense. Alice is that type of child who has not been raised to live in a world characterized by ambiguity. Her world is represented by the highly structured one of Victorian England, but in both contexts, growth means accepting ambiguity and uncertianity. The image of Alice represents a collage of different ideas regarding the childhood, the girl being an innocent child, and not an appealing character.

At the horizon of Alice’s growth in shape and size, the author approaches the real concept of crossing childhood and developing in all ways toward adolescence. Alice is able to consider whether having grown in size means that she made her own choices in terms of growing up and becoming an adult, the reader pondering the meaning of maturation. Wonderland is a realm that is no apparently connected toreality as long as it is an area ruled by nonsense and incoherence, where the reader may lose the sense of space and time. Both books have plenty of language games, to the reader's delight to Alice’s confusion, being also filled with logical games, referring mostly to Carroll’s private life as well as to Victorian society. The games reflect language pains and advantages as language represents a source of adaptability and joy and it can also be the fountain of confusion.

Adventures of Alice reveal a figural path in the profound search of meaning and of solving internal conflicts, the girl functioning as an effigy vision of Carroll's child, who combines simplicity and complexity, equipped with a particular understanding of universe.

Alice goes through a variety of mental changes in an absurd manner. The discomfort she feels because that is never a right size that can be seen as a symbol of the changes that occurs during adolescence, at puberty. Alice finds these changes tragic, frustrating and sad, and she has feels of discomfort while she experiences.

Growth, as a transition from childhood to maturity is presented in the third chapter of the present study. Challenging Victorian girlhood, Lewis Carroll’s fairy tales emphasize the fact that children had the opportunity to visit the magical world, where the rules of the logic are forgotten, where no one behaves as expected, where nobody can do what he/she is said to. Alice’s life in the world of freshly made discoveries is not easy. It even contains all the data for renaming it, at least by reference to a child, as cruel. Space and time radically modify the direction and their contents are strange, from the rabbit or mouse speaking up to the cat that appears and disappears and the cards that play croquet games with hedgehogs and whose Queen condemn them to death. In addition, contrary to the prototypical children from rich Victorian families, Alice receives the commandments and complains sometimes about them.

Game is an element of childhood, both in Carroll’s art and in the Victorian reality. The game, together with the dream, are located in the centre of everything else that had happened, representing a way to penetrate an order top of the real world, where they can be accessed with profound knowledge.

What is really the wonderland where Alice enters the dream, shining in the hole of a rabbit? The rabbit hole may be considered a journey in a single direction, an universe in a fairy tale, as well as an universe of a fairy tale. Falling down the rabbit hole, Alice slips through a dark tunnel, on whose side walls are visible shelves with books, paintings, maps, some of the world scholastic utensils or a jar of marmalade that the heroine snatches while passing. At this level, that of the experience of supra-individual space exploration onto an abyssal pessimism, the oneiric shall designate through Alice’s trip as a formation of a compromise product. The size is called upon to satisfy simultaneously, two contradictory instances: the desire aware of himself as part of the psychic system, be governed by the conscious and, on the other hand, mindless nature of the desire the unconscious recorded in the form of tendencies, phantasms, symbolic images that belong to the dream.

Alice’s journey in Wonderland is the pretext of the scan of the world of dreams, therefore should be established as an ethnical through its own unconscious state. The world separated from Alice when she comes into the rabbit hole constitutes a rigid space in which social norms are strongly drawn toward to link as the most powerful agreement between man and world. In this reality of ordinary world, the individual is docked to the system according to the countless rules, in order to remain placed in what one may define, as a general rule, normality. Instead, Wonderland describes a subjective reality, the spirit, the metaphysical horizon in which the natural character is given by the illusory and by the ability of the man to project beyond the reality of the possible. For this reason one may treat this metaphysic reality, of imaginary facts, as the only suitable to explain the truth. The normality will hold the false projection about how is the world. When the Alice decides to follow the white rabbit, she takes part to everything, an excursion until then, based on miraculous and some values on which until then she denied. Now everything becomes more curious. Tended by the self-overrun, the only way to acquire is to be cast in the universe of miraculously in which Alice is introduced by the rabbit.

With respect to matter’s ascent and compulsion, Alice finds herself in relation with her own body, described in terms of a study on physicality and gender, while her whole body is the evidence of self-identity. Personality crisis is evolving towards the Oedipal complex, Alice finally identifying with the central projection, fantasy castrating mother, usurping the Queen. The new identity conformation of the central character meets Oedipus complex world governed by the mirage of mirrors. In this respect, a dual mirror appears as forming or deforming the body identity. Alice is constructed as an image character and projections likeness generated by the confrontation between conscious and unconscious. Ironically, Carroll highlights the fact that physical development is only a half of adulthood’s road. Alice cannot control her size, so neither her position in adulthood. The food can make Alice living well in Wonderland, but only experience can make her become wise. Alice goes through a variety of absurd mental changes. The discomfort felt by the little girl because she never had the right size can be seen as a symbol of the changes that occur during adolescence, changes of puberty.

Wonderland’s universe is unknown and incomprehensible and Alice makes it look familiar, logical and certainly very funny … and vice versa – everything that seems to be normal turns out to be the opposite. If Alice can go through life, to live it and make friends, then anything is possible, and the children's imagination can go beyond the limits imposed by the adult world. In this regard Alice’s survival in the confusing world of adults is related to the fact that she perceives the adults’ world as a reality different from the place where she adventures. She structures the perception of this reality in her own way, running through a maze of dreams. For Alice, adult’s world is a paradoxical and an absurd one and in the presence of a paradox, Alice’s mind buzzes, the enthuses exalts its own limits, its own "mess" of the contained funds

For Alice, the paradox is a logical limit, while the absurd is a failure of it.

The purpose of this work was that of studying the manner Alice enters in the magical world of fantasy and how she accommodates there, how she identifies herself with elements of those realms. Somehow, Alice is challenged to enter the world of endless imagination, to interact with characters there, considering that she comes from a totally different space. A portal to this world of challenges is the rabbit hole through which Alice enters in a labyrinth that seems without exit, emphasizing the reality of the dream where the girl gets lost into, but also where she suffers different changes. The paradox occurs together with the passage in an unreal plan as a challenge to leave the real world. Alice suffers a multitude of profound changes in this magical world, both in from physical and mental points of view. Alice’s feelings are characterized by ambiguity, being changeable while she moves from a state of dissatisfaction to one she identifies with the fantastic space.

CHAPTER 1. LEWIS CARROLL’S WORLDVIEW IN THE CONTEXT OF VICTORIAN AGE

Growth in the Victorian age

The Victorian age is considered to be a period of prosperity and peace in Britain. During the 19th century, the British state expanded its territories all over the world. British colonies reached an important part of India’s western territory, Canadian territory and also some areas of the Australia, Middle East, as well as New Zealand, together with certain parts of the Pacific Ocean, respectively Fiji, Tonga and Papua Islands.

During the first half of the 19th century, Britain’s economy experienced a boom without precedent. By the 1850’s this country was considered to be the richest nation at global level. It was the leading banker, shipper, and supplier of manufactured goods due to the industrial revolution. During the period of 1851 – 1881, the gross national income doubled, while the industry was flourishing.

In that time, Victorian society suffered a division into social classes in a well-defined manner. This hierarchical structure was based on hereditary privilege, being considered a result of years of British tradition as a feudal society. During the Victorian age, difference has reflected the acknowledgement that social classes only gave a title to people superiority and also, difference was rooted in a strong way at all society levels. In this respect, from the social point of view, people became conscious of their own status. Although there was an increased social fluidity, class structure survived through the era.

An important aspect of society in the Victorian age was represented by some changes in the rural and urban environment.The population moved from countryside to cities, this movement resulting in deep going social changes. This way, there was established a new working class, its representatives working in areas where industries were growing. Cities such as Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Liverpool or Sheffield increased their population by almost 50% in ten years, but these areas were not prepared to host such a large amount of inhabitants. Therefore poor neighborhoods quickly proliferated and expanded the cities. During the Victorian period, London’s population experienced an increase from 2 to 6 million of people. In this respect, big populated areas became disagreeable places to live in comparison with the idyllic rural places, described in many Victorian literary works.

The new industrialism emphasized the gap between poor people and rich ones and the misery of the working class was in a big contrast with the outrageous luxurious living during the Regency period. Between 1820 and 1830, there were written fashionable novels, also called silver fork ones. They were novels that dealt with high society lifestyle. But, during the 1840’s, they suffered a loss of popularity in social protest context, with a larger influence. In this category, one of the most famous novels is Oliver Twist written by Charles Dickens. It was a well-known novel because it condemned the Poor Law, which forced poor class to access the workhouse or orphanage systems. In 1845, Benjamin Disraeli wrote Sybil; or the Two Nations , intending to highlight the evident problems of the poor working class, the inhumane conditions of living, emphasizing poor people desperate state in factories and outer neighborhoods, making obvious the fact that British Empire wealth was not distributed in an equal manner to all social classes.

The year 1859 was the time when Charles Darwin published the scientific book “On the Origin of Species”. This book represented a synthesis of scientific ideas, many of them being already current, but with some essential additions such as the natural selection. This publication was considered to be the turning point for science history, marking the beginning of evolutionary biology. It caused huge debates and long discussions in scientific, but most of all, in religious communities because it was considered to challenge the Bible’s creation conception. Thereby, its author supposed that the man and any other creature were just products of evolutionary history. It was a new conception about evolution that generated a great polemic since the Victorian age.

Queen Victoria’s name was suitable for this period because of her figure’s importance. She became a standard reference to the extent she embodied, depicting the values of her age. Being characterized by morality as those acts which it makes sense to describe as right or wrong, good or bad and in this respect, while the main values of Victorian morality were prudery and decorum. In this regard, moral probity, family values, lack of humour, restraint, reserve, uncomfortable attitudes towards sexual domain, black clothes or serious faces in photographs characterized the era. Intolerence was notoriously manifested towards a certain category of people, such as social deviants, including lunatics, criminals, homosexuals , they all being punished and treated in a severe way.

In the 1830’s there was a re-emergence of books about etiquette and they became very famous. After the huge popularity of fashionable novels ten years earlier, both writers and publishers considered that aristocratic manners were a good means of marketing, bringing a big profit. These books were, specifically, a sort of manuals, but they were not manuals as were those in the XVIIIth Century, addressed to aristocratic families for teaching their children the behaviour matters or the manner to conduct in the household. Nonetheless, etiquette books in Victorian England experienced a huge development being addressed to the people of middle class, respectively to the newly rich ones. In Curtin’s opinion, at the beginning of the 19th century, the concept of richness was synonym to the one of aristocracy. Few years later, in the 1836, the writer Charles Day wrote about Hints on Etiquette, emphasizing the importance of etiquette in society. In a mercantile state as Britain was, people acquired new professions while the society developed more and more. This way, rarely did it occur that their manners’ polish kept pace with a rapid advancement.

Books on etiquette were iconic for or symbolical Victorian England in an appropriate way. These literary papers taught people how to behave in different social situations, as well as making use of good manners. Some of these books were particularly addressed to ladies, one of the most popular being The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility written by Emily Thornwell. This book gained reputation by giving advice about manners, dress code and art of conversation in certain circumstances. The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility was proper for the higher social classes and it the good manners presented in it played a very important social role.

The Vicotria Age , alongside with he Medieval Age, Early Modern Age as well as the Long Eighteenth Century may be considered to be the most fruitful periods for the British Literature. The Victorian period is considered to be overturned by the Modern one, even if modernism does not have enough capacity of encompassing the various literary arts. Even if the Queen was the same one, the national culture was in a continuous change. Nowadays, it is difficult to imagine an equivalent of contemporary eminent and emblematic Victorian figures. The Communist Manifesto provided the title for Marshall Berman’s book about “the experience of modernity.” In Berman’s opinion, the modernity period was a divided experience. Paraphrasing him, one may consider that being modern is similar to finding oneself in an environment that promises power, growth, adventure or transformation of ourselves and of the entire world and at the same time, that aims to destroy everything one has, everything one knows, everything one is. It highlights an paradoxical element of the feeling that was outlined as a response to the creative destruction caused by the industrial modernization.

According to Eric Hobsbawm, ”from 1789 to 1848 the European and American continents were invaded by British experts and continuous developing technology such as modern engines and other types of investments”. The British nation was characterized by a premier advanced industry on the planet during the XIXth century period. In certain situations, the term “Victorian” obscures the modernity of the Brontës and the Brownings, of Dickens and Eliot or of the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes.

As far as literature is concerned, one might claim that different scientific discoveries had their part of influence over its effects during the Victorian period. Studying all the great writers of this period, one may mark four important characteristics:

Literature in Victorian times tended to be closer to daily life, reflecting its problems and interests and becoming a powerful instrument in terms of human progress. From social and economic points of view, Industrialism was continuously growing and different reform movements such as child labor, women’s rights, women emancipation and evolution constantly influenced the literature of the time.

The Victorian literature seemed to have a moral purpose. There were teachers such as Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning or Ruskin that had faith in their moral message in order to instruct the population

In terms of idealism, literature in Victorian age was often considered to be an era of pessimism and doubt. Here, one might feel the influence of scientific breakthroughs as the whole period came to see man as being connected to the universe that supported the evolution idea.

Victorian age was practical and materialistic, a period when many writers considered life to be pure and ideal. Victorian period is an idealistic one where the great aspects such as truth, love, justice or brotherhood were idealized and emphasized by essayists, poets or novelists.

Literature was also characterized by a specific language- in this respect, new words related to fashion, leisure, chemistry, medicine, food, pshychology, alongside with colourfull expressions and slang- bristly particularities of it being considered a response to the march of modernization. While during the preceding Romantic period, the dominant genre was poetry, in the Victorian age, the novel was the most important. In this respect, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) dominated the first part of Victoria's age, “Pickwick Papers ” being his first published novel (1836), whereas the last one was called “Our Mutual Friend” (1864). William Thackeray, another important writer (1811-1863) published his most famous work “Vanity Fair” in 1848, and the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, also published important works in the 1840s. A later novelistwas George Eliot's (1819–1880). Anyway, the major novelist of the second part of Queen Victoria's reign period was Thomas Hardy (1840 and 1928).

When we turn to poetry area, Robert Browning (1812–1889) and Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892) were the most famous writers of the British Victorian Age. Nevertheless, the most recent tastes tend to consider that Thomas Hardy’s poetry is more representative for the Victorian period. He wrote poetry throughout his life, but he did not publish any collection until 1898. In the same situation was Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 to 1889), whose poetry was published in 1918, after his death. An early poetry was that of W. B. Yeats who published his poems during the Victorian era.

In terms of the theatre, significant works were produced in the last decades of the XIXthcentury. Starting with Gilbert and Sullivan's works of comic influences in the 1870s, various plays developed in the 1890s by the work of George Bernard Shaw (who lived between 1856 and1950) and finished with “The Importance of Being Earnest” written by Oscar Wilde and published in the year 1895.

For certain, the most famous novelist of Victorian age remains Charles Dickens. Even today he is very popular, being one of the most read of the Victorian period. He wrote his first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836), at the age of twenty-five, enjoying an overnight success. In this respect, all of his subsequent literary works were sold very well. The comedy of Pickwick Papers is marked by a satirical edge, this aspect pervading Dickens writing. The author worked in a diligent and prolific manner aiming to obtain an entertaining writing loved by public. By means of his work, this author offered commentary about social problems and the plight of the poor and oppressed social classes. Distinct from the paper entitled “The Pickwick Papers”, Dickens’ most important works are represented by Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. A pronounced tendency was manifested for darker aspects through his fiction, but also in most of the XIXth century literary arts.

In the Victorian literature, the great rival of Dickens was William Thackeray. Having a similar, but a slightly more detached style, his writings were acerbic, accentuating the satirical edge of his characters. Thackeray tended to portray a more middle class society than his rival did. William Thackeray is best known for his novel Vanity Fair (1848).

In Victorian period literature one might observe an example of a popular form, respectively the historical novel. In this situation, recent history is presented by the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte and Emily. They wrote notable works of the period, but these work were not immediately appreciated by critics of that time. The most appreciated work was “Wuthering Heights” (1847), Emily's book, representing Gothic Romanticism in a woman's opinion, the novel examining myth, social class and gender. Emily’s sister, Charlotte, is the author of “Jane Eyre”, another major novel that approaches gothic themes. “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” was written in 1848 by Anne Brontë in a realistic style rather than in a romantic one, being especially considered the first sustained feminist novel.

In 1860, George Eliot published “The Mill on the Floss” and in 1872, her most famous work was “Middlemarch”.

In the later decades of the Victorian age, the most important novelist was Thomas Hardy, his literary art including works like “Under the Greenwood Tree” that appeared in the year 1872, “Far from the Madding Crowd” (published in 1874), “The Mayor of Casterbridge” in 1886, as well as “Tess of the d'Urbervilles” published in 1891. Other significant novelists of this Victoria’s reign were represented by Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–1865), Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), George Meredith (1828-1909), and George Gissing (1857-1903).

In the Victorian age, novels idealized portraits of people living in difficulty in which perseverance, hard work, luck and love win in the end. In this kind of writings, virtue was rewarded and people acting against society’s rules were punished in an appropriate manner.

In terms of children's literature, the Victorian age is assigned with the title of “inventing childhood”. This heading is accounted for certain efforts in stopping child labour and in introducing mandatory education. The literature for children became a developing industry as younger ones were able to read. This way, there were established authors who wrote works designed to educate children, a good example in this situation being “A Child's History of England” written by Charles Dickens. There was also established a group of authors dedicated to children. In this category, the most famous writers were Lewis Carroll, Anna Sewell and R. M. Ballantyne. They wrote stories for children, though one of their common feature is the adult perspective. There was a group of authors who wrote especially for adult people, but their novels were characterized by infantile adventures. This group was that of Anthony Hope and Robert Louis Stevenson.

A popular form of child literature was the nonsense verse and nursery rhymes. This is a type of poetry which required a childlike interest, a representative author being Lewis Carroll. In this respect, school stories recorded a massive development, such as “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”, its author being Thomas Hughes and “Stalky & Co” , written by Rudyard Kipling. Poetry and drama also had an important place in Victorian literature.

The Victorian era abounded in comic verse. Certain magazines such as Punch or Fun ones were of humorous invention and they were designed to a well-educated readership from distinct social classes. By far, the most famous collection of Victorian comic verse is represented by the “Bab Ballads”.

The reclaiming of the past represented a major area of Victorian literature manifesting an interest in both classical and medieval literature in Britain. The Victorian readers were passionate by tales of heroic profile and the best example in this regard should be considered the “Idylls of the King” written by Alfred Tennyson, which approached the stories of King Arthur, combining them with contemporary ideas and concerns.

The year 1855 represented the time when the German Reed Entertainments started a process of elevating the level of musical theatre in England, culminating over the famous comic series written by Gilbert and Sullivan . They were followed until the year 1890 with the first Edwardian musical comedies. The English comedy “Our Boys” was written by Henry James Byron and it represented the first play that achieved five hundred consecutive performances by its opening stage, in 1875.

Soon, Oscar Wilde was considered to be the leading poet and dramatist in the late Victorian Age. His plays were not similar to those of Victorian times, but to ones of Edwardian period. In “The Importance of Being Earnest”, the comical side stemmed from an ironic image of the aristocracy, at the same time highlighting wit mastery and wisdom of paradoxical nature.

In terms of science, Charles Darwin remains the most representative author. His scientific work was a masterpiece entitled “On the Origin of Species” and it affected all society beliefs in the Victoria era, but still does nowadays. It is considered that the Victorian age was an important era of scientific development and people were trying to describe and classify all the natural world.

Great non-fiction works of the time were those of John Stuart Mill who wrote in a philosophical way, covering themes related to logic, economics, liberty and utilitarianism.

One monumental work begun in the Victorian period was the Oxford English Dictionary. Due to its major importance, it would eventually become the most important historical dictionary of the English language.

As far as fantastic literature is concerned, one might claim that the old Gothic tales came out of the late Victorian era and represented the first examples of the fantastic genre. These tales were mainly focused on larger-than-life characters. Good examples in this way may be the most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake or Phileas Fogg, as well as many other fictional characters such as Edward Hyde, Dracula and The Invisible Man. Spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, the literature implied gothic, a particular type of story-writing. It is known that Gothic literature involves a combination of romance and horror aspects in order to thrill the reader. There are many symbols in a gothic novel such as curses, witchcraft, certain monsters, ghosts and hidden rooms.

These tales usually develop in locations such as monasteries, castles or cemeteries, although monsters, sometimes, exceed the imaginary limit, entering in the real world, terrifying places such as Paris or London.

Victorian literature had a significant influence on writers from other countries. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a famous writer from America, was able to create literary works of a Victorian feel. Writers in the United States of America or in the British colonies of New Zealand, Canada or even Australia were influenced by Victorian literature . In this category one may include Canadian writers as Susanna Moodie, Grant Allen, Catherine Parr Traill, as well as Australian poets such as Adam Lindsay Gordon or Banjo Paterson, New Zealand writers as Thomas Bracken and Frederick Edward Maning.

1.2 Child status in Victorian age and its reflection in literature

Children life in Victorian period could not be called childhood as it is today. For children in the rich families there was an overwhelming sense of boredom and the constant prodding to be proper and polite, the communication between child and parent being almost absent. In the poor families situation, life was very different. Practically, these children were forced by their lifestyle to find public jobs for their needy families to survive.  For them, toys were represented by wooden blocks or homemade dolls. The good aspect in poor families’ cases was that they were more united and children felt love from their parents.

But during the Victorian age, a great number of orphans were marginalized, they being considered a threat to social stability, a feature that figures often in children’s Victorian literature for didactic aims or propagandistic ones. Abandoned children’s stories were by far useful for individual narratives development and implicitly, for the literary genre. The luckiest of this category were “adopted” by some relatives, while others were taken to orphanages. According to Allan Woodcourt , it was easier for the society to take care of a street dog than a child who had no family. The abandoned children’s situation was darker as it seemed; children were often very dangerous in terms of being exploited by criminals, also being a threat to order and law

In Victorian literature were used highly emotive figures of speech. Focusing on a child character's lack of parents could unleash the reader's sympathy. An outstanding example in this respect is the one of Tom, the protagonist of “The water babies” written by Charles Kingsley and published in 1863. In this regard, the narrator addresses to the child reader's imagination through the fantastic underwater adventures of Tom. For another category of authors, orphans were useful too. The didactic nature is still present, but it is addressed to children, not to reader’s imagination. A good example may be the one of Jan in Juliana Horatia Ewing literary art “Jan of the Windmill: A Story of the Plains”, published in 1876. Here, Jan was not a desired child, being considered by his family a "frail fretful little creature".

According to Peters, the situation of truly orphaned children offered unique opportunities for moral shaping, emphasizing the fact that children were used for housework; receiving a proper education, as well as a suitable upbringing, such children could develop well. But it was hard for the people living in Victorian times manifest positive feelings about children who did not take part of a caring family. As Laura Peters considers, people associated this kind of children with other ones considered anti-social elements such as foreigners or gypsies.

In Victorian literature, the orphan is above all a character out of place. He is forced to make his own shelter in the cruel world. The novel itself developed under the image of a genre that represented the efforts of a commoner in order to follow his way through the life tests. Therefore, the orphan represents an essentially novelistic character, being free from certain established conventions to face a world of wide possibilities as well as dangers. Dickens’s Oliver Twist remains innocent despite the criminal company he has. As many of other characters, Oliver Twist makes the reader enter a world of labyrinth which is full of experiences, threats and opportunities. Being the story’s central point of interest, the character emphasizes a naive reflection of others’ qualities.

Ironically, in Victorian literature, the figure of the child was treated as a commodity and emphasized as never before. In this era, the cult of the child was understood in terms of labour, as well as education, and performance, depending on the social class they belonged to. Innocent simplicity of children was considered a healthy response to vulgarity and also skepticism in modern life.

The cult of the child was evidenced in Lewis Carroll novel Sylvie and Bruno published in 1889as well as in J. M. Barrie’s work “The Little White Bird” published in 1902 , children appreciation in aesthetic or religious terms revealed a disturbing tendency in order to conceive the child as the ideal romantic partner; in these literary works, obsessed bachelors prefer different children rather than women. Dowson wrote the sonnet “Of a Little Girl” in order to emphasize the charms of a young girl. The sonnet is inspired from the author’s real life: he was in love with Adelaide Foltinowicz, a girl of 11 years old and he made her a proposal when she was 14. Even if it is very weird and one may find it as an improper act, Downson was not the only writer in this situation. There were some eminent Victorian personalities as the writer John Ruskin or the Canterbury Archbishop who also loved young girls, accepting child prostitution.

During the Victorian age, children were regimented in a harsh manner. In those times, various memorising techniques were very important for the optimum development of the learning process. It was a learning method developed by Puritans as a means for children religious instruction. For children of Victorian age, recitation was the most important element of their education and lives. A good example in this respect is the one of Alice, the main character or Lewis Carroll’s children’s tales. Even the writer has experienced this method because his family was a methodical one. In time, he manifested his annoyance toward the rules one imposed on him.

The relations established with the Romantic ideal of childhood are well defined in Victorian context , but in the Victoria era many children’s literature writers, including Lewis Carroll who wrote the most famous children tale “Alice in Wonderland”, expressed by means of their works a desire of being themselves children once more.

1.3 Lewis Carroll’s profile and literary success

One may consider that literature for children has always existed. Starting with the XIVth century, it was reflected in a group of adventure tales, in verse, and at the same time, it was related to a tendency of keeping alive the folklore. This aspect supported storytelling, oral tradition, but also childhood, they being combined in a harmonious manner. In the late XVIIIth Century, children's literature as it is known, actually emerged by melding various authors’ ideas and vision of the world. This type of literature is considered to be both didactic and moralistic and it reflects a devout attitude of the society, authors wishing to perpetuate it through their literary art. One may attribute that piety concept to the growing middle class of society, this one being influenced by the Evangelical movement that occurred in the first part of the XVIIIth Century, in the context of protestant phenomenon evolution.

The XVIIIth Century was the time when Lewis Carroll, an English mathematician, writer and photographer authored the most famous book for children: Alice in Wonderland, as well as the book Through the Looking Glass, the last one being the sequel. The author’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and his writing was addressed to readers of all ages and class, and it still does. Carroll used to focus on using logic techniques, as well as word play and fantasy, enchanting readers and leading them into the fabulous world of literature. At the same time, this extraordinary writer has influenced many artists of modern art and culture.

Since his childhood, Lewis Carroll wrote a series of stories and poems of short length, they often being humorous by means of mockery at various levels. He started his career as an author by writing stories and poems of short length with no passion, but in order to contribute to the Mischmasch magazine, owned by his family. Later, when he grew up, he sent many times his literary work to other magazines and initially, he had a moderate success. In time, his work occupied a place of honor in The Comic Times and The Train, famous national publications. The year 1856 was considered a total success for his work due to the publishing of “Solitude”, his first romantic poem.

While Charles Dodgson was a teacher at Christ Church in Oxford, he started to write literature in a comic way, and also parodies in order to publish his work in the newspaper The Train, a humorous paper of the XIXth Century. When he published his first piece to submit to this editorial, he used the B.B pseudonym, but the editor asked him to change it. In these conditions, the author believed that Dares was the most appropriate, but in the editor’s opinion, it was too related to the journalism domain, so the writer made some anagrams and variations of his name, finally deciding on the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In this respect, one may realize that he was truly fascinated and attracted by anagrams, this aspect proving useful in his future literary work. Also, its mathematical and logical works are reflected in his way of thinking.

Carroll composed several plays, scripts, poems and sketches in order to publish them in the magazines he owned. Usually he was attracted by satire, eventually satirizing his own disability, attack of Micropsia and Macropsia. Making a selection of Lewis Carroll literary works, the most interesting bibliography may be represented by poems comprised in Further Nonsense Verse and Prose  published in 1926, The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll  published in 1982 or The Humorous Verse of Lewis Carroll  published in 1960.

With respect to prose, the most impressive works of Lewis Carroll were represented by, A Tangled Tale published in 1885, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland published in 1865, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There published in 1872, Curiosa Mathematica (Part I and Part II) published in 1888 and 1893, Doublets: A Word Puzzle published in 1879, The Nursery Alice published in 1889, Feeding the Mind published in 1907, A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to His Child friends published in 1933 and so on.

Analyzing Lewis Carroll writing, one would consider that many aspects of his life brought a major influence upon his work as these aspects are related to mathematics and logic, as well as photography, eating habits, sleeping difficulties, ignored childhood, dual personality, or lifestyle in Victorian age. These are certain features of Lewis Carroll’s life, they being reflected in his literary work, mainly in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the most famous tale for children. Considering this novel, it was published in the XIXth century, in 1865, during the reign of Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom. It was a period of prosperity in the economic point of view, confidence and also optimism when the good atmosphere dominated over the English nation.

Even if the author was suffering from a vocal disability, he proved to have fluency when talking to different young people, children in general. This way, he entered their world and identified himself with it. In time, Carroll got inspired by this fascinating world and in this respect, he described it in a great part of his writings. Even if he loved to spend time with children, entertaining them, all with good intentions, lately, some speculations emrged with respect to his orientation. The attraction he had for young girls derives from many moments of childhood that he spent with his sisters.

Lewis Carroll's portfolio is wide, but of all its works, the most famous by far was and remains Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . It is a novel addressed to both children and adults, considered by critics to have a correlation in nonsense literature, while in others’ opinion, it is an extremely moralistic tale for children. In this regard, many readers of Christian religion considered this novel to be one of the best pieces of moral literature, giving to Lewis Carroll the status of a veritable Christian writer.

“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a tale addressed especially to children, written by Lewis Carroll and published in the year 1865. This book presents a trip into the imagination of a little Victorian girl named Alice. The girl falls down a rabbit-hole and arrives in Wonderland, a bizarre realm where she encounters fantastic characters and where she is involved in strange situations and conversations with the inhabitants of this magic world. Also, Carroll published another children book, a sequel of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, entitled “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there”

Carroll was a great friend of children, an adversary of violence in dealing with them and he real pleaded for a better education in order to develop their imagination and to form their character. The pages of his books are characterised by creativity, through a critical reporting to reality and by the consciousness of the value of good. It shows in the work a large scale of human values and on the existence . He writes his best when he is narrating from the perspective of the child. („Do you hear the snow against the window-panes, Kitty? How nice and soft it sounds! Just as if some one was kissing the window all over outside. I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently?”, „They don’t keep this room so tidy as the other”, „Why, it’s a Looking-glass book, of course! And if I hold it up to a glass, the words will all go the right way again”)

Anyway, one thing is clear: this novel is distinct from all other Victorian ones in terms of children literature. This is a certitude because the author of the story was a perfect gentleman who could enter into the dream world of children through techniques only he knew.

As an individual with a developed logic, Lewis Carroll has adopted different methods in order to complete practical tasks because he loved games. This feature of him was also reflected in his literary work. In this respect, he was the author of many treatises in the mathematical domain, but at the same time, all his fiction works were strewn with a multitude of logical elements, good examples being the chess game, the looking glass, language puzzles, cards, different games and the world of unknown.

In real life, the author had great interests in games such as croquet and chess, this aspect being reflected in his work, respectively in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, chapter eight. Even the obsession he had about eating was highlighted in many of his writings. For example, in the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, food could be found in a negative, but accentuated light, always having repercussions on the individual, by changing the girl’s size. Also, the process of eating is associated with bad aspects of life, such as sin. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the girl was in the garden and she wanted to eat the tarts of the Queen, given that she was aware that it is wrong, one could consider that Alice represents Eve, the biblical character, while the garden may be the Eden and the cookies, the evil serpent. Also, the emphasis is many times on the mouth, for example in the case of the Cheshire Cat’s appearance when its grin is the first one that appears, but the last that disappears.

Other aspect of Carroll’s life with implications in his literary work is represented by his sleeping difficulties. For example, in the novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the dormouse was not able to stay awake during the tea party. Another sleep related situation is presented both in this novel and in Through the Looking Glass one where the protagonist are believed to have fallen asleep and started dreaming.

The Victorian age influenced Carroll’s work through women dominance. In this respect, while in the real world Queen Victoria was reigning the Kingdom, in Carroll’s stories Wonderland was an Empire reigned by the Queen of Hearts who was bigger than her King from many points of view, such as power or size. Based on the fact that the Victorian age was an era of punctuality, Carroll reflected it from the beginning of this famous novel, through the scene when Mr. White Rabbit was late at that “important date” and he had an overreaction. Also, the rigidity of this era is reflected in Carroll’s novel in passages when the little girl almost offends different creatures of that fairy land. Also, the author’s eccentricity could be seen in his literary work.

Carroll’s neglected childhood was another factor that influenced his compositions. His parents were not paying much attention to his four sisters and he was the only one who took care of them.

1.4 Paradox, fantasy and ideology in Lewis Carroll books

In his literary compositions, Lewis Carroll uses alternative worlds reflecting escapes from the present one, as well as dealing with its different and alternative issues. His books reflect morality aspects as well as different children responsibilities. In this respect, ideology about morality, life, tradition or childhood is challenged in his literary art. Lewis Carroll is still one of the literary personalities that wrote about the bottom up universe, experienced the world of children, connected the fantastic with literature’s tradition and so on. He was also able to make a subtle comparison between euphemisms and metaphors (for instance, the moment Alice influences the Mouse, her dialogue partner, who was not tolerant with humans speaking of cats and dogs; there is also an euphemistic transformation of sign-vehicle and manipulating it, the girl achieves the effect of protective magic), introducing the readers, both children or adults, into fascinating realms. In this respect, the author might be considered a refined stylist.

Literature for children is full of emotions in a universal language and the images a good writer is able to create represent instruments that have the capacity to provoke people in many ways. Lewis Carroll belongs to this category of writers. He is sophisticated due to the fact that he has the capacity to create unknown realms, fantasy worlds where readers could identify themselves through wonderful characters.

In this respect, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is considered to be an imposing literary work of art on the strength of the author’s amazing vision of the world.

Also, Through the Looking Glass is another work of literary art that Lewis Carroll wrote in addition to the previous one mentioned above. These two novels imply fantastic characterization and setting, describing a transitional process that begins in the real plan, continues in the fantastic one, while characters acquire different roles and identify themselves with the world they live in. Alice, the protagonist of these two novels, passes through various experiences: while in the first book, the little girl identifies the hole of a rabbit and she passes through it, reaching the realm of Wonderland, in the second one, the girl enters a world of glass. Both novels are written in a manner specific to children’ s literature, but they are different from other types of tales because they highlight the transition Alice passes through. There are true fantasies addressed to children of all ages, but there are also fairy tales and in their case, realms are defined by basic principles that could be found also in real world (logic principles, the principle of childhood) Wonderland and the land of glass fit perfectly into this picture by means of chess game rules, reign, size. Although the two lands are characterized by these rules, they are not similar to the real world. Paradox between real and fantastic is amplified by the specificity of these rules. In this respect, the author used such rules in the fantastic world and they have an applicability distinct from that in the real plan.

First, fantasy is supported in Carroll’s books by the idea of transition. Through the Looking-Glass and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are two novels where the protagonist’s journey is an adventurous one. Also, transition is illustrated by the passage from a stage of child to the path of adulthood. Dreams are considered to be elements of transition in Carroll’s books. Alice experiences many life stages. In Wonderland, for example, she discovers herself in a place of nonsense, a very strange and bizarre one. The accent the author puts on this transition is also evidenced in Alice’s journey to the world of glass. Here, she arrives in a world where chess is dominant and Alice takes on different roles ( such as child and queen). Also, one may consider number 11 as a magical one. In Astrology and Numerology, it is believed that this number is a Master one. It also signifies sensitivity, honesty, inspiration, spirituality. It is an idealistic number that reflects experience. Carroll included number 11 in this novel when presenting the scene of Alice winning the chess game in eleven moves.

Both novels signify Carroll’s genius. The formidable adventures Alice experiences highlight the author’s creative, but particular skills concerning realms characterized by extraordinary and unprecedented fantastic elements. Lewis Carroll literary works have their own rules inspired from the real world, this aspect denoting a sense of reality present in the most fantastic moments. By presenting the adventures of his characters, the author proves that he creates fantasies. For example, Alice is in delicious half-implausible and absurd situations, meets singular and unforgettable beings, enters into dream-like passages and plays games with language and logic. Carroll wrote a story that symbolizes the time the girl stops being a child an begins to penetrate the fascinating, mysterious and absurd world of adults. Going down the rabbit hole, Alice is moving forward in time to that moment, and nearby, she will enter the social world of the adults. And to get to the bottom of the hole, the first dilemma it poses is whether or not that bottle there on the table drink, whether to grow or not grow, that is, if done or not done adult, that adult always in a hurry … it's late, it's late.

Lewis Carroll has a particular sensitivity concerning the imaginary plan and his novels highlights a certain degree of creativity (“Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, ” “What road do I take? , Where do you want to go? , I don’t know. Then, it really doesn’t matter, does it?”), satire, nonsense (”Why it's simply impassible!, Why, don't you mean impossible?, No, I do mean impassible.  Nothing's impossible!”; ” Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”) or fantasy (the Unicorn) and by means of this characteristic he earned his place as a popular writer in children’s literature. Nonsense is mostly presented through language, in expressions such as “Everything has got a moral, if you only can find it” or “Who in the world am I?[…]that’s the great puzzle!”. In Lewis Carroll’s novels addressed to children, one may find an ambiguity („Right now, I do not know for sure, sir. I only know what I was when I got up this morning. But then I think I've changed a few times”, ), as well as an amazement at character’s features’ level. The protagonist and the other characters, ask themselves a series of questions or give answers that seem to make no sense, very strange questions and answers that only children could conceive… Entering the dream world together with Alice, the reader finds out that “everything is strange” and “nothing is surprising” for the protagonist and the same state is transmitted to the reader. Here, the protagonist experiences adventures in a paradoxical and fantastic manner creating a considerable uncertainty regarding spatial and timing elements, as well as discourse and sense ones.(”But I don’t want to go among mad people, said Alice. ”Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. ”We’re all mad here.”, ”it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” , “Who are you?” said the Caterpillar. “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.” “What do you mean by that?”. “Explain yourself!” , “I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” “because I’m not myself, you see.”)

The protagonist of these two novels passes through a phantasmagoric and fascinating adventure, the author creating a paradigm at intellectual level which the mutability of language and meaning influences many other literary work arts. Language may represent a tool of nonsense, combining with memory or dream. This way, the reality and its alternatives can be transmitted by interpretation or communication from one character to another.( ” Well, I have met you, but you are so grumpy, Dumpty, you hardly count as an acquaintance. Humpty You mean, ignorant minute barbarian, that you have never met my brother, the other egg? … and his name means….What do you mean his name means? His name is Dumpty Humpty and his name means Dumpty Humpty. … If you are called Dumpty Humpty, that is what your name means. In the same way as I am called Alice and my name means Alice.”)

Despite the fact that language seems to be connected to logic, there are reflected some ambiguities at some words level and sentences. These are the elements that the author focused on exploring and exploiting, but also manipulating. This nonsense game is present all over the novels, the author’s contribution and involvement being reflected in the reading experience of individuals.

In this regard, Carroll exploits the link that exists between memory and language, but also, at the same time, he seeks to find meanings of social or other domains under the word surface. ( ”Speak in French when you can’t think of the English for a thing— turn out your toes as you walk— and remember who you are!” ) Lewis Carroll considered that language influences the whole human universe. It represents the most important means of communication, interpretation and even experimentation. Experiences could be better understood if they are better presented, explained or interpreted. In this respect, Lewis Carroll’s genius contributes to nonsense under the image of a linguistic game.

Lewis Carroll’s writings obtained the fabulous literary feature of success after he exploited the enchanted functions of a metamorphosing language. Characters’ acts of speech are supplied with a distinct kind of potential, the magical one; for example, the address of changes into the object named. While Alice experienced her life adventure, a baby transformed into a pig, a saucepan became a helmet. In this regard, language functions as a type of spell in Carroll’s books.

Cruelty is not free of charge in the world to Alice, but it appears in popular stories, as a fantasy, being a mark of real consequence and entry into fiction, in a world of alternatives. If it can be said that the story to Alice is about direction and relativity, then it should be said that disturbance of the reverse uproots a tradition of consensus, the actual reality being fundamentally helped by the manifestations of cruelty (“Well, it must be removed,” said the King very decidedly, and he called to the Queen, [..], “My dear! I wish you would have this cat removed!”, ”Off with his head! she said, without even looking round”). At the end, Alice appears as an existential enriched, happy girl having a simple heart and loving others. And this happens because, unlike other writers, Carroll structured his propagandistic stereotypes fiction with children, and emotionally, he waived the perspective of nostalgic fever on childhood, without losing sight of the importance to Alice as a symbol of existential growth, of turning towards/going to maturity. So, in a possible examination ethics, his books would not encounter a problem. Alice’s life in the world of freshly made discoveries is not easy. It even contains all the data for renaming it, at least by reference to a child, as cruel. Space and time radically modify the direction. Their contents are strange, from the rabbit or mouse who speaks up to the cat that appears and disappears and the cards that play croquet games with hedgehogs and whose Queen condemn them to death. In addition, contrary to the prototypical children from rich Victorian families, Alice receives the commandments and complains sometimes about them.

Above all, Alice learns to think in the absence of any marks of secured reality, to think with her own mind, to distinguish between the reality and language, between what the others are and what they claim they are. Alice’s way of thinking leads gradually to assumption, including lacks of practical evidence to Alice who has to cope with fights, threatening, shows courage, adapts to situations. On the other hand, there are lessons taken directly from the world of wonders, as well as that to know in which direction you are going. In this respect, there is another message of Alice’s adventures, respectively: a journey, even by fantasy which is a debut, vertex or accumulation of experience.

Carroll's fantasy is a remarkable emancipation in terms of imaginative literature for the period. It is not simply a story about a girl's adventure in a strange and unreal world; it is addressing contemporary issues (such as consumption and consumerism, human rights, racism) and an exploration of the unconscious.

In both novels about Alice’s adventures, there was established a contrast at the level of the frame and the adventures , undermining hopes or implying suggestions by tackling certain conflicts between real and imaginary worlds, as well as adult or children states (“Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to takemore than nothing."
"Nobody asked your opinion," said Alice.”, “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” ).

In Lewis Carroll’s books, there are certain elements of conservative ideology under the aspect of an unconscious knowledge, that constantly should to be understood in order to be functional. Ideology of equal exchange is clearly illustrated by this author mostly in his two famous novels, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice’s world seems more like a caricature place. The ideological value of his literary art is related to the conflict between different ideologies as expressed by words of characters he invented . Alice escapes the infantile pattern and behavior pattern Victorian. She adventures, goes behind the fun, the different, the pleasure that experience could bring to her, without thinking about the consequences or punishment. It is not a children's character that follows and / or preaches a specific model – it is, rather, for the Victorians, bold patterns, because they do not care about the consequences of their actions. She subverts therefore the behavioral paradigm expected by Victorian English society of children and adults, as children were seen as "mini adults". In these novels, Carroll’s ideology is expressed by means of many symbols and signs .In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the author tries to outline the lines of a society intending to achieve the perfection, but ends in being unpredictable and absurd as the imagination of a child.

The paradox appears also in the two books mentioned before. Thereby, it is related to the labyrinth Alice passes through, to her experiences when she deals with word logic, as well as word play, but also to the parallel created between the protagonist and fantastic creatures. Even if Lewis Carroll was inspired by logical and mathematical elements all over his career as a writer, at the first glance, these two novels are nonsense ones. In the adult world, as Alice discovers, all or almost all values are conventional.

CHAPTER 2. THE CHALLENGE TO MOVE FROM THE REAL WORLD TO THE IMAGINARY SIDE

2.1 Reflection of reality through the eyes of a child

As classic tales in children’s lives, “Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland”, together with the sequel “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there” were written by Lewis Carroll 150 years ago. Alice is the main character in both books, a little girl who was element that inspired of a golden moment in literature. According to Jenkyns Richards, these two tales stand as “wonderful and purely books for children”

In Carroll’s books, reality is reflected through the eyes of Alice. In the realm of wonder, Alice considers that “the King felt very uncomfortable when he sat down between those two great creatures; but he could not identify another place.” First of all, this picture illustrated by the narrator’s voice, marks the scene where Alice presents to a lion and unicorn the White King’s plum cake considered to be a peace offering after their fight. In real life, this image portrays the arms’ royal coat in the United Kingdom. The tamed and chained unicorn may be considered Scotland’s symbol, while the lion signifies the symbol of England. One may consider that this illustration reflects current political situation, the narrator referring to it in “Through the Looking-Glass” book, when Alice encountered the fabled Beasts while she was in the White King’s company.

Because the author lived in the Victorian age, his writing was significant influenced by it. Ratner considered that “For Victorian people, caught as they were on the cusp of a new age in which all old certainties were dying, Lewis Carroll became a way of affirming that things such Wonderland, fantasy, sainthood, unicorns and other magical creatures really had once exist”. Even before the author’s death, his assumed name had become the ultimate embodiment of this Victorian aspiration toward otherworldliness. These imaginary elements were considered to be ”a vision of a golden age in the context of developing the human condition.” Even though a multitude of aspects in Carroll’s workcriticized Victorian values, he promoted the female dominance of Britain’s royal order within Wonderland in a subconscious way.

In the 1960’s Martin Gardner published the volume “The Annotated Alice”,   a collection of theories and research designed for scholars and containing detailed information about the life of Carroll and the adventures of Alice’s. Gardner suggested that many characters in Carroll’s tales figure and trait as the British civilization (severity, consumerism). He also analyzed each of Carroll’s work as a piece of art from the perspective of a mathematician, showing his interest in symbolic logic and word play. In his opinion, Alice resembles the British people because she is able to evoke traditional English culture by means of subtle jokes and references in the form of mannerisms. For example, Gardner emphasizes a two-finger handshake exchanged between Humpty Dumpty and Alice. In the real society, this was a Victorian gesture made by the society’s elite to inferiors, but nowadays it does not have any meaning.

A good example is also the moment the caterpillar smoked a hookah and tried to identify Alice, by asking who sheis. In real life, sometimes, English people used to directly approach strangers out the sphere of amusement (English people and strangers such as students from another parts of the world went frequently to coffeehouses) and repeating a similar phrase . Another characteristic of Victorian society reflected through Alice’s eyes is punctuality; in this respect, the White Rabbit was paranoid about being late. A Victorian obsession, the one of over-consumption, is represented in Carroll’s books by Alice’s constant eating and at the same time, it refers to the issue of contamination in food market and water supply. “The plentiful supply of food in Wonderland blatantly contrasts the true situation in the Victorian world at the time. Despite the vast quantity of sustenance in Wonderland, many of the foods that satisfied Alice were unhealthy”. From a religious point of view, this may be interpreted as gluttony, a major sin.

In Wonderland, one may observe a lack of structure in terms of a direct and symbolic critique of children’s nation governed by a set of rules. The manner Alice interacts with all creatures of Wonderland could be compared to the British imperialism and to the prejudice towards countries conquered and colonized by Britain. According to Gwynne, “the little girl falls into Wonderland, uses the resources of this realm and highly judges its natives. Alice is a girl seven years old, but despite her age, she sets herself far above creatures in that world, considering them to be disreputable and insane”. Gwynne also believed that Alice was tolerant from the social point of view until things were directed towards a complete and utter nonsense. Alice is that type of child who has not been raised to live in a world characterized by ambiguity. Her world is represented by the highly structured one of Victorian England.” . Here, one may emphasize the point that growth means accepting ambiguity and uncertianity. Distinguishing dream, myth and fairy tales in contribution to the formation of identity.

Lewis Carroll also satirizes educational methods used in the Victorian era, Alice constantly struggling in order to apply things previously learned in her elementary lessons.Moreover, the narrator highlights the idea that human beings are forced to adapt to different cultural demands and circumstances, this aspect reflecting the idea that conforming to rules is not always the best solution. Alice “receives order by almost every creature she comes in contact with. She is forced to learn this world’s strange rules, and this way, she believes that she is constantly doing something inappropriate although she has done nothing wrong for a child of her age. These are unreasonable situations that emphasize the strictness characterizing the Victorian world, particularly towards children” . First, Alice seeks rules under the image of guidance in the moments she is in trouble. However, only the control Alice takes of situation creates new rules that can overcome the girl’s challenges and find her way out of Wonderland.

Everyone from adults is governed by rules, such as perceives no sense. Life is so absurd and arbitrary as the croquet game organized by the Queen in her own gardens. So, Alice faces the world of adults, not to see it from outside, but to enter it. Alice is immersed in a world where reason ceases to exist and yet everything has its logic and things work properly despite everything. Nothing is as it seems, but everything is authentic. Conventional rules fade giving way to strange situations even own imagination, but perhaps all this is possible only by the fact that a childhood come from a deluged mind.

In an ironic manner, the British royal order and female dominance in Wonderland reflect Queen Victoria’s reign. As mentioned before, the lion and the unicorn represent two powerful forces of royalty. In real life, these characters symbolize Henry the IInd , the king of England, and Eleanor, the Queen of Aquitaine. According to Tyler, there was a medieval theory in which the lion and the unicorn could have been considered symbols of Henry II and Eleanor’s marriage. Alice meets these fantastic characters in a manner revealing a sense of self-contradictory conflict, as well as a direct reflection of the disputes between the King and Queen mentioned before. One may consider this scene evoking political fights, as well as the tradition between England and Scotland, the enemy nations that were in a constant fight over the royal crown.

“Traditionally, the relationship established between the lion and the unicorn had antagonistic aspect, and a reference to this dates from the early 3500 B.C. in Chaldean Art. The nursery rhyme outlines this aspect, and one may believe that it tells the story of Scottish Royal Arms shuffled with those of England when James the VIth of Scotland was crowned and received the name James I of England. After the Hanoverian succession, the title was removed and this may represent the period when rhyme was shaped and the conflict between the two countries resumed.”

In the tale “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there”, the girls encounter two new characters, Bill the Lizard and the “Man in White Paper”, these ones symbolizing the Prime Minister of Britain during 1874-1880, Benjamin Disraeli. The Man in White Paper is relevant in a particular way to the scene with the lion and unicorn’s conflict, being significant to British politics among the Conservative and Liberal parties. The Alice tales are full of enigmas, some of which experts have still not been able to solve. In this respect, Carroll’s true intent is still unknown.

British writers of 19th and 20th century considered that literature for children was less about reading for pleasure and more about teaching an important lesson regarding child’s awareness. “Previously, most books for children had been either educational or improving; the only purpose of Alice series is to give pleasure”. Carroll had a special connection with children and he truly understood them in a way that most adults did not, treating his little friends like his equals rather than inferior ones. Brown considered that “In Victorian society the value of education was notorious. Also, social conformity is an emergent appreciation of childhood, but, at its level, one fostered a revolt against the literary dampening of children’s imaginations and individuality” .

In the Victorian age, the period of childhood was highly valued, most people considering it an innocent state of grace in the lifetime of every individualthat should be longer preserved.

Lewis Carroll made an effort for maintaining the concept of pure innocence within his work. On the subject of this author’s famous fictional female, according to the assistant English professor and specialist on children’s literature, Victoria Ford Smith, “The image of Alice represents a collage of different ideas regarding the childhood, some of them one may find familiar or unsettling, Alice is an innocent child, and not an appealing character. This tale is not connected with whimsy, fantasy and imagination. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland represents a critique of children different education methods. One may identify a strange example of Victorian culture, but it is so complicated”.

Turning to the main narrative sequence, Alice, on his way to go in conjunction with the adventure object value, are faced with many obstacles. They appear in her way but these obstacles are solved magically. When Alice has to overcome a barrier, she needs a knowledge and power do to overcome the obstacle, knowledge and power are given to her magically, through modal magic objects, which give her the power to continue to her main performance. This happens several times during the narrative. Those magical elements, that enable the continuation of Alice's journey can be seen as a critique of logical and rational thought that was very present in the XIX century. By placing the magic element as the only possibility to solve

problems of Alice, subverts a vision of Victorian world based on thought logical and hard, and the hard work to achieve a goal. Two rigid and oppressive attitudes are challenged, therefore, by Carroll's book, so implicit: the religious and dogmatic morality and rationality that people believed be able to solve all the problems of society.

Carroll develops a wonderful, but cruel world straight from the mindset and through the eyes of a little girl. He presents the reality from the point of view of a child’s hyperbolic fantasy, a reality where adults are very irresponsible and impulsive, childlike and cruel, as well as self-indulgent. Carroll plays with these prejudices and manipulates them, pointing through Alice’s eyes, the manner these characteristics also apply to adults, respectively to authority figures and royalty.

At the horizon of Alice’s growth in shape and size, the author approaches the real concept of crossing childhood and developing in all ways toward adolescence. Alice is able to consider whether having grown in size means that she made her own choices in terms of “growing up and becoming an adult, the reader pondering the meaning of maturation”. This aspect ultimately proves that the literature for children is not as simple as it seems, especially in this author’s mind.

Alice lives in an unique adventure that remind readers all that they live is in their dreams. She is an English girl of good education that continues to reason and imagine what does not seem to astonish at all anything that she lives. In fact, she changes in stature at any moment, she meets many animals, she hears many stories of the characters and is invited to strange events and parties. Alice enters a surreal and dreamlike world of waking up just before the Queen of Hearts, that strange shrieking and dominant woman who wants to cut girl’s head. The uncertainty of adolescence appears when Alice meets the blue caterpillar sitting smoking with a hookah. This question arrogantly the girl for her identity, to which she replies doubtfully, as having changed several times in stature and does not know who he is. The Blue Caterpillar is the rational logic, doubts and patience as a mother of science.

Even if the Alice stories were written for children, one may consider that the author’s purpose behind them might be: to teach all people about the society he lived in from a different angle and to encourage his fellows to preserve their childish curiosity and ask questions. “In order to respond to different social changes that occurred both on the basis of the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial one and the decline of religious beliefs, writers in the Victorian age adopted a moral aesthetic, thinking that literature should provide fresh values and an understanding of the new society. Novelists examined complications of creating a personal identity in a world where traditional social structures were breaking down. Particular social aspects were their subject and outlined their expression form”. Other ones may think that there is more or less to tales than that, but Alice truly said that a book without pictures or conversations is useless. In this respect, the reader is invited to interpret the text as he or she considers to fit better because finally, there are no right or wrong answers.

Carroll created the character of Alice on the basis of Alice Liddell’s features, the second daughter of the Dean of Christ’s Church, Oxford. . The girl was very pretty and melancholic, so she became the dearest of all Carroll's child-friends. He loved her and used to entertain her with riddles, puzzles, poems, jokes, ditties or caricatures. The author also used to photograph children several years before writing the tales of Alice.

Carroll was able to portrait the child of his dreams who was also a true dreamer in the author’s vision of the world’s folly and his vision wasthe main myriad themes that have inspired artists all over the world.

Outside routines, adults live tied to the custom, as the Mad Hatter and his eternal tea from six o’ clock. Carroll assumed critical behaviors that are never questioned. Alice, throughout the book, get used to freedom and adventure, and, on waking from sleep, is "boring and stupid life take its normal course".

Although “Alice in Wonderland” was a book written for a child, no other book addressed to children has received so much attention from adults. As long as the world of adult was making sense of children, children were having trouble in making sense of what must have seemed to be an increasingly extended world.

Initially, in Wonderland, Alice thinks crossly about her sister's reading matter, speaking as a Victorian child who had a similar background as young Lewis Carroll: “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?”. The author of the two children books grasped intuitively the power of images in order to imprint themselves on the collective consciousness in the era of mechanical reproduction. For years, Carroll tried to make the Alice pictures himself, and their awkwardness sharpens his fantasy's quirky weirdness.

Carroll made a great difference in the Romantic heritage of fantasy in terms of childhood imagination, and to the interest of his contemporaries in internal states, adopting structures of technological and scientific level of the new magic media. His photographer skills, together with the capacity of using tricky games coordinated Alice in space and time in the Wonderland context: the girl grew and decreased in size as in a lens or developing tray. The realm of Looking Glass was governed by phenomena of reflection and refraction called catoptrics, which operate in the reflex camera. Alice transits multiple forms of reality, being more and more confused. In the end of the first book, Alice's sister dreams her while telling the story of the fantastic dream to her children, and at the end of the second one Alice asks her kitten “who it was that dreamed it all […] You see, Kitty, it must have been either me or the Red King. He was part of my dream, of course – but then I was part of his dream, too!”.

Alice cogitates: “Let me think, was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I am not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I? Ah, that's a great puzzle!”. These represent existential questions that signify the key point of the most recent controversial philosophy of personality, but Lewis Carroll had been exploring them for years. Alice beckons readers to penetrate their own fugitive feelings and desires, their own elusive dream worlds.

The author outlines a labyrinth with no exit through the eyes of a child, emphasizing the reality of dream life and the absurdity of conventions, combining modern method and making his dream child the engine for other artists dream work.

Wonderland is a realm that is no apparently connected toreality as long as it is an area ruled by nonsense and incoherence, where the reader may lose the sense of space and time. Nevertheless, there are elements of Alice’s books reflecting aspects of Carroll’s time, Britain in the context of the Victorian age.

Both books have plenty of language games, to the reader's delight, but to Alice's confusion. Often, these games point out language inconsistency or slipperiness, in general, and English, in particular. They also reflect language pains and advantages as language represents a source of adaptability and joy and it can also be the fountain of confusion. Just as enigmatic is the bizarre logic in the world of Wonderland. Every creature is able to justify his absurd behavior, and arguments are often fairly complex. Characters’ strange reasoning is another source of delight for the reader, while for Alice it is a real challenge because she has to learn to distinguish the unusual logic from the utter nonsense.

Alice’s books are filled with logical games, referring mostly to Carroll’s private life as well as to Victorian society.Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a novel written for children and remained a classic one in children’s literature. The tale is considered to be representative for nonsense literature, a genre that flourished in the Victorian times that made play of linguistics and logical sense.

The author used all types of stylistic means for creating the effect of nonsense. In this respect, he played with synonyms, homonyms, oxymorons, metaphors, homophones, onomatopoeias and so on. (“shut up like a telescope”, ”Alice in Wonderland”, ” "You see the earth takes twenty-four hours to turn round on its axis " "Talking of axes, chop off her head!” ) Often, Wonderland’s characters did not follow the fundamental language rules, turning the logical sense of what they are staying upside down and confusing Alice. Considering the following conversation between Alice, the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon, one may observe that Carroll used nonsense, playing both with the meaning and sound of words:

“ ‘And how many hours a day did you do lessons?’ said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.

‘Ten hours the first day,’ said the Mock Turtle: ‘nine the next, and so on.’

‘What a curious plan!’ exclaimed Alice.

‘That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked: ‘because they lessen from day to day.’ “

Nowadays, the novel is appreciated both by children and adults all over the world. Beyond this apparent world of fantasy, one may find units of Victorian society reflected in it. For example, most of the Wonderland inhabitants have a behavior similar to the one of contemporary human beings. They also have anthropomorphic features, like the speaking ability and some of them wear human clothes a good example in this situation is the White Rabbit wearing a waistcoat and white gloves).

Carroll plays with linguistic conventions in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, using wordplay or playing with multiple meaning. The author is very inventive, he invents words and expressions, but he also identifies and develops new meanings for certain terms. The author also used neologisms as instruments of nonsensical literature, inventing new words such as “uglification”. When Alice said “Curious and curiouser!” , this exclamation suggests that her surroundings and the language she uses to describe them develop beyond expectation and convention. Wonderland is the realm of all possibilities and the author’s manipulation of language emphasize the sense of unlimited possibility.

The girl adopts a language that contains words such as “curious, nonsense, confusing” while travelling in Wonderland for describing something when she has trouble in explaining it. Even if the words she uses are generally interchangeable, she usually assigns curious and confusing to different experiences she passes through. Alice has curious or confusing experiences and she desires to gain a clearer image of how that individual or experience functions in that magical world. When the girl declares that something is nonsense, as she does in the case of the trial case in Chapter XIX, she has a tendency to criticize or even reject the experience.

In the second tale, language is seen as an instrument used for ordering the world because it has the capacity to anticipate and cause events. For example, on several occasions, Alice recites nursery rhymes causing Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion and the Unicorn to perform actions that she describes in her rhymes. Instead of recording and describing events that have already happened, in Wonderland words give sense to actions simply by being spoken. The twins mentioned above have a conflict, but only after Alice started to recite a rhyme about a broken rattle. Similarly, Humpty Dumpty’s fall occurs when the girl describes the events in a classic rhyme. Language covers actions in Looking-Glass World, instead of describing them in a simple manner. The flowers reinforce this aspect by explaining that a tree can scare enemies away with its “bark.” In real world, there is no connection between the bark of a dog and the bark of a tree, but in the World of the Looking-Glass, this connection is possible, having a common and very functional basis. Barking trees are able to “bark” in the same way dogs do.

Alice involves in different social events and games, these two having common features with the British ones in the 19th century. Bivona suggests in his article “Alice the Child-Imperialist” that “these events reflect the customs and traditions of the invaded land. Wonderland is being disrupted by Alice, who does not accept the native rules, therefore manifesting her ethnocentric behaviour”.

The first game situation the girl is introduced to is the Caucus-Race. She assumes that this experience has the same features as the ones she is used to play. As any other Victorian child, Alice knows that such experience has a beginning, an end, and also, a winner. Anyway, in Wonderland the race does not have a specific configuration, as the competitors are not lined up and run around at random. In terms of politics, this type of race represents a “committee that takes decisions for actions of the group or party” and “committee members run a lot in circles, getting nowhere, and with everyone wanting a political plum” , similar with the fantastic characters in the novel. The race also finishes arbitrarily, when the Dodo decides it. The winner is not a matter of concern in the caucus-race, everyone being a winner and taking part of an award ceremony where Alice is forced to participate even if initially, she did not want it. The Dodo takes the decision that Alice will present the awards, giving them to all participants. Under the image of an imperialist in the realm of Wonderland, the little girl does not seem to be very respectful towards the game. She considers that the Caucus-Race is an absurd game and she almost laughs at it, but for Wonderland inhabitants, it is a very serious business, as they all look very grave.

The next game Alice participate to is the croquet game organized by the Queen. Again, she stumbles upon and tries to relate it to its English version, based on some common elements such as croquet balls and mallets, even if the Wonderland’s ones are represented by hedgehogs and flamingos. The hedgehogs go through arches as well, but the arches are represented by soldiers of the Queen who double themselves up and stand on their hands and feet. Different form the English croquet field, this one “ was all ridges and furrows”, making the game very complicated version of normal one. Moreover, the balls and mallets in this magic world would not stay in the same position very long, and the soldiers always move, changing their position. The players are not instructed to wait for their turn, they all playing at once. Another rule which is Alice is not accustomed to is that the Queen cannot lose any croquet game. All these different particularities of croquet in Wonderland make Alice to consider it a very twisted game. As a result, the girl considers that it is an impossible version of the English game she knows. The aspect she does not realize is the one that Wonderland and England’s version of games are very different, based on distinct values and rules. In this respect, at the Caucus-Race and at the Queen’s Croquet Field, Alice does not take into consideration the fact that Wonderland has its own types of games with own rules and values and she imposes her own version onto.

Games are also played in other areas of Wonderland. For example, in the strange game of croquet that everyone plays in Chapter 8, instead of life resembling a game, a game comes to life. All the pieces, from the croquet soldiers to the flamingos to the hedgehogs are animated creatures. Nowadays, this seems rather cruel to us today, but Carroll means for it to be funny. As the croquet game proceeds, the situation is very complex and delightful. And, of course, the croquet game is rigged, since the Queen of Hearts arrests and punish to death anyone who might beat her.

The next social event Alice participate is the “Mad Tea-Party”. Even if not being invited, Alice becomes an intruder:

“ ‘No room! No room!’ they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

‘There’s plenty of room!’ said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.”

The tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  refers to a game underlying the action, the game of cards. The Queen, King and noblemen Alice meets, take all part of the heart suits, while, fittingly, the spades end up as gardeners and the clubs as soldiers. However, different from the tale “Through the Looking-Glass”, the first book is not structured on a games’ moves. There is not any particular card game being played by characters, in a metaphorical or literal manner, behind the scenes of Alice's experience in the realm of Wonderland. Here, the card are personified and together with the talking animals, they are part of Alice’s childish fantasy. Playing cards, wild rabbits, pet mice and housecats are all elements of Alice Liddell's everyday life that the author draws in order to populate the world of fantasy.

The world of the Looking-Glass is structured like a chess game, where chess pieces represent characters and Alice is a pawn on the chess table. All the adventures of this girl are complicated dramatizations assigned to different moves in the game. Specifically, most of this book’s editions include a chart of chessboard and moves, created by Lewis Carroll himself. As he explains in his note, “ the red and white pieces cannot take adequate turns, but all the moves in the chess game are directly related to ones of the characters made in the book.” The girl was part of a game of chess and this one organizes the mechanism for all her adventures in the World of Looking-Glass.

Alice’s experience was a trip following the rules of a traditional chess game in a proper manner, the perspectives and movements of individual characters corresponding to the movements of their chess pieces. Despite this, The Red and White Queens are able to view unlimited all over the board because queens have the capacity of moving in any direction and crossing, in a single turn, as many spaces as they want. Different from the Red and White Queens, the Red and White Kings can only move one space at a time in any direction. However, they have the same perspective as the Red Queens, but with a limited mobility. This limitation is the explanation of the fact that the White King cannot follow the White Queen as she runs away from the other chess characters, moving too fast. As a pawn, Alice can move only forward once space at a time, excepting her first move when she can cross two spaces. In the position she has, the girl has a view over only one square ahead, but in the moment she reaches the final square and becomes a Queen, she has an extended view over the whole board, now having full mobility as a queen chess piece. The moment she moves in order to take the Red Queen, there is the Red King produces a checkmate, the chess game finishes and Alice wakes up from her magical dream.

The chess metaphor outlines why the Queens are able to move in such a quick and erratic manner, since they can cross the chess board in any direction and in any number of squares they want to and why the White Knight has trouble when he rides in a straight line, since the Knights can only move in the shape of L format.

In the novel “Through the Looking Glass and what Alice found there”, going into a journey in a bizarre and uncertain world in order to become a queen instead of a pawn seems to be a metaphor for growing up. Observing the picture of Alice crossing over the into the square number eight, one may notice that the King is full of sadness. He is sad because he cannot follow Alice and this situation resemble to Carroll’s one in real life when he cannot stop Alice Liddell of growing up. More specific, the book has hidden morals, implying the idea that life represents only a game, where rules are arbitrary and they are not nearly as meaningful as people like to believe.

For Alice, every new encounter has, somehow, the aspect of a game; in Wonderland, as well as in the real life, there are always rules to learn, and consequences of learning or not learning those rules. In Wonderland, games signify a constant part of life, starting with the Caucus race and finishing with the unusual strange croquet game. Every new means of socializing is for Alice, a game where bizarre and apparently arbitrary rules are to be mastered by the girl. Learning the rules is a way to express the metaphor of adapting to new social situations that every child makes as growing up. Mastering each challenge, Alice becomes wiser and adaptable as time flies.

During the epic lice of  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the girl faces many puzzles with no clear solutions and imitates the manner life frustrates expectations. Alice considers that different situations experienced by her will make sense, but her ability to figure out what Wonderland actually is and what it does it really mean, was frustrated. Alice is involved in trying to understand the Caucus race, in solving the riddle of the Mad Hatter, and understanding the unusual croquet game of Queen, but to no benefit. Every time, the challenges presented to her have no purpose or even answer. Even though the author was a logician, in this book he makes a mockery of games of logic, jokes and riddles. Alice learns that she cannot find logic in the situations that she is involved, even when there seem to be problems, riddles or games that would have solutions in a normal way. In this respect, the author emphasizes the manner life frustrates different expectations and resists to any interpretation, even when problems are, apparently, solvable.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland occur in Alice’s dream, so that the elements of the real world combine with ones of Alice’s unconscious state. The dream motif is a strong explanation of the nonsensical events that abound in the tale. Similar to the dream, the epic line introduces the dreamer as she meets many episodes in which she tries to give a sense to her experiences in connection to herself and to her own fascinating world. Even if Alice’s experiences lend readers to important observations, these ones resist to a coherent and singular interpretation. In the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass, Alice falls asleep, just as she did in her Adventures in Wonderland, so that the result was the one of some fantastical adventures occurred while she was dreaming. The tale follows the little girl through different episodes of the World of glass and the readers may be able to experience Alice’s adventures through her eyes about the chess game, the House of Looking-Glass, and her quest in order to become a Queen. Characters and scenes that she encounters while she experiences represent a mixture between her memories and impressions of the real world and the fantastic one, some illogical inventions of her dream. Carroll emphasizes the dream motif by basing some of the denizens of Looking-Glass World on individuals from the life of his real-life muse, Alice Liddell. For example, the Red Queen is based on Alice’s governess Miss Prickett, while the White Knight is closely based upon Lewis Carroll himself.

Nowadays, going "down the rabbit hole" represents a metaphor that symbolizes aspects such as exploring a new world, taking drugs or delving into an unknown subject or place. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the rabbit hole represents the place where the story begins, where Alice’s dream comes to life, where the girl takes an unthinking decision when followed the White Rabbit, leading her in a great and unforgettable adventure.

Anyway, one may consider that Alice's decision was pretty reckless. In this respect, if Wonderland would not be a magical fantasyland, Alice would probably be killed due to the fall, so she had no idea where was going, what she was facing, or how to return home. One may also notice that going down the rabbit hole is a one-way trip, with only an entry, but not an exit from the magical world.

Almost everything in Wonderland represents a symbol, but nothing clearly signifies one particular element. The symbolic resonances of objects in this fantastic realm are generally contained to the individual episode in which they appear. Often the symbols work together in order to express a particular meaning. The garden may symbolize the Garden of Heaven, an idyllic place where beauty and innocence governed and Alice is not permitted to enter. On a more abstract level, the garden may represent the desire, in its context Alice focusing all her energy and emotion in order to try to attain it. These are two symbolic meanings that co-work for underscoring girl’s desires .As the garden symbolizes whether the Eden or the experience of desire, the Caterpillar’s mushroom has also multiple symbolic meanings. Some critics consider that this element has a sexual meaning, the Caterpillar being considered a symbol of sexual virility. The Caterpillar’s mushroom is connected to this symbolic meaning. According to the epic line of this tale, Alice must master mushroom’s properties in order to control her fluctuating size. One may consider that the fact that her size fluctuates represents the bodily frustrations in terms of puberty. Others think that the mushroom is a hallucinogen in Alice’s surreal and it distorts her perception over the realm of Wonderland.

In the world of the Looking Glass, the rushes Alice pulls from the water represent her dreams. Rushes are those plants that grow in riverbeds and come to the water’s surface. Their rapid fading after being picked is correlated with the memory’s ephemeralness of a dream after one wakes up.

The Sleeping Red King is another symbol of Alice’s wonderful world. Tweedledum and Tweedledee insist that Alice is only Red King’s dream creation, implying that the world of the Looking-Glass does not represent a construction of the girl’s dream. This way, the Red King is pictured as a divine figure who has the capacity of dreaming up all of Alice’s adventures, eliminating the idea that she does not actually have a real identity beyond what she is allowed in the dream’s context. This idea may be assigned with the one of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley who believed that the universe and people are part of God’s imagination.

There are also Mathematical Symbols in both Alice’s books. The Caterpillar is a mathematical one. For example, the girl’s exchange with the Caterpillar parodies the initial purely symbolic system of algebra, proposed in the second half of the XIXth century by the London mathematician, Augustus De Morgan. He had proposed a more modern approach in terms of algebra, which held that any procedure was valid as long as it followed an internal logic. This allowed for results such as the square root of a negative number, which even De Morgan himself called “unintelligible” and “absurd” .

De Morgan considered that “algebra is a word that derived from an Arabic phrase translated as al jebr e al mokabala, related to restoration and reduction. He explained that even though algebra had been reduced to an apparently absurd but logical set of works, some type of meaning would be restored. Such mathematical reasoning was, for certain, excluded by a logician like Carroll. In this respect, the Caterpillar sitting on a mushroom smoked a hookah and Alice was subjected to a monstrous form of reduction. She first tries to “restore” herself to her original size, but ends up “reducing” so quickly that her chin hits her foot.

Alice has slid in a world where her size varies in an obvious way from one governed by the logic of universal arithmetic. She considers this is the root of her problem:

“ ‘[…] being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’

‘It is not, said the Caterpillar”

The Caterpillar comes from the world of symbolic algebra and advises Alice to “keep her temper.”In Carroll’s times, intellectuals still understood “temper” in terms of proportions where qualities were combined. In this respect, the Caterpillar tells Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion, even if she cannot maintain the same size for a couple of minutes. Proportion was the aspect that mattered in Alice’s world.

The Mad Hatter represents a strong passion symbol, as it is always mad. Also, this character symbolizes the timing concept. Time is a prominent motif throughout the epic line, as the Mad Hatter gave explanation: “[…] suppose it were nine o'clock in the morning, just time to begin lessons: you'd only have to whisper a hint to Time, and round goes the clock in a twinkling! Half-past one, time for dinner”. Time is personified and it leads to the idea that it is very easy to be manipulated in the context of the Wonderland.

“Looking-Glass” represented the name of a mirror in the Victorian period. Mirror images are real world reflections. But they are opposite as they reflect the backwards version of normal things. In the novel “ Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice found there”, the author manipulate somehow different types of reflection, reversal, as well as opposition. But the most important aspect to be noticed concerning these different forms of reflection an reproduction of reality is that they are not consistent. The author introduces each for a moment, in a single scene, but they represent just words in the wind, jokes.

2.3 Experience challenge through the eyes of Alice

Knowing first impulses in the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, particularly through the Baroque, but to a certain extent and romance crisis with the main symptom feeling of the absurd has seen its culmination in the XXth century, creating a new type of literature, the absurd. In the first part of this century, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry considered that „Everything is absurd. Nothing is in a certain place. Our world is made up of parts that are not adjusted to each other. But the materials are not to blame, but the Watchmaker. The Watchmaker is missing”.According to Nicolae Balotă on the edge of this statement, “Watchmaker is not God, but a man that feels alien, alienated, through the artificial, lacking an axis of values, having no contact, through his own helplessness with the transcendental verticality. Thus, the man who does not move only on a horizontal axis, where the quantitative and abstract dominates humans to feel alienated from their own humanity, to perceived reality as a world that is capitalized, it bureaucratize, automating and, finally, it seems to decompose, feelings that humans passed on. In this context, they underlined the limits of reason, for the irrational, impenetrable logic that seems to dominate”.

But the absurd man is not one who resign before the divorce, as is the case with human existentialist philosophy, but is revolting, following Miguel de Unamuno’s statement: "I do not accept the rationale, I revolt against the it as everything is vital is also antirational". In this context, a literature of the absurd emerges, a literature in which man appears as being reified, alienated, seized by anxiety and uncertainty, but also boredom, indifference and cynicism in the face of a world dislocate, reaching the point that "Parody prevailing in things descends in language" , is found at this level nonsense, paradox, clichés, equivocation, inconsistency and so on.

Although symbols of overcrowded beings are widespread in the cultural history of humanity (the cat under its various forms, unicorn, griffon's twins, caterpillar) that supports a variety of interpretive situations, the two books of Lewis Carroll contain two of the most powerful representations of their own output bin significant saving and recovery of consciousness itself: the tree and the mirror. Also joining the female character by the presence in Carroll’s writings, the two "bridges" in fact merge symbolic images of the same unique road of initiative.

Unlike other famous childhood books (Pinocchio, Buratino, Gulliver's Travels), the first trip of Alice reiterates the myth of underground kingdoms (to remember that the original title of the book was Alice's Adventures Under Ground) which can retrieve Germanic legends about Nifiheim or about underground populated by spirits and ghosts. Slipping them on those realms signifies, in fact, fall into your own self by a space "unknown" where Alice will have to face their fears, anxieties, and the feeling "forgotten self" is the one that deeply marks and a "maturing ".This state of being between two worlds is the sign of outbreak and Alice has an identity crisis. Like Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, she always asks who is really as it passes soon through a variety of changes in body (“I do not really know who am I. I knew who I was when I woke up the morning but I changed a lot since then "). Another important fact in Alice’s experiences is the path toward initiatives when trying to recite a poem from memory (the memory before the fall). The words she spoke were quite different from what it was ordinary to hear, and especially, they handed the difficulty of defining nature could not (yet). The symbolism of the tree hallow, one through the medium of which Alice penetrates the space unknown's own ego, which can be assimilated to an axis mundi between real (surface) and imaginary (underground) is reconstructed in the image mirror in her second journey (beyond the mirror). If her first descent into self experience the intensity of anguish, fear primary unknown in the second highlights initiatives met by a character who exceeded the fears and inner demons and matured due gaze in the mirror and, once this fact, the recognition of identity occurs. Significant for this detachment from self and retrieving old in a new form, more complete by self-knowledge, the new self-representations are more reiterative uniting the two writings and providing symbolic transformation of the main character. First episode dance is an important symbol in the two texts. In Wonderland, Alice looked indecisive and careful while dancing without integrating other characters in the game, while in mirror Land, she actually participated in dance.

Another symbolic transition from an early stage of (self) knowledge beings to one that reveals a character aware of his qualities is the two "feasts" at participating Alice. In Wonderland, the bottle and the cakes were labels that were reflecting what to do (to drink and to eat) at the end of the second story the Queen gives many things to Alice where she is attending a banquet .

But the most significant transformation archetype of Alice one may meet in "baptism" of their symbolic tears (a figurative death) of Wonderland. It is the ultimate stage in the process of becoming her character's descent. From now begins the "ascent" towards a meaningful mirror. In the second nobel, the symbolic function is taken over by its very tear mirror through which it passes and begin their journey of revival, tears no longer a sign of death, but a threshold which she exceeds the total transformation.

One may consider that Alice in Wonderland is an experience’s context, where unit is refused and constitutes itself as protagonist beings plot dispersed, wandering through the abyss of the unconscious. It remains to be seen to as if one can speak of a willingness main character interpretation approach toward using our instruments psychoanalysis. If this approach proves valid question legitimate purpose road moving toward Alice: Alice discovers that the end of the road through the dream world ?; How to set up this space in order of depth psychology?

Therefore one would try to highlight the following: Alice bonds with her own body and she explores the world of dreams, so the unconscious. At this level, the abysmal experience space exploration supra, oneiric designate by Alice in dreamland journey up a product of compromise. The size of memory is called to serve simultaneously two instances contradictory desire conscious sleep, as an integral part of the psychic system, governed by conscious and, on the other hand, nature instinctual a desire unconscious relevant form of impulses, some fantasy, symbolic images that belong dream. Duality designate the Freudian acception where the main function of the dream is named disguised satisfaction of unconscious desires.

Initiative, approach suggests the graduation rites of individual character (individuality for that character encompasses basic elements, significant other characters, especially the characters created by his own unconscious) as a conglomeration of ideas, emotions, emotions and impulses driving, which are considered autonomously. The construction concept can notice synonymous with the psychological complex, a Jungian belief. Thus, one is witnessing the development of an identity concept through the individuality process synonymous with significance. In a broader interpretation, the states mentioned overlap personal dream experience over the construction of a complex psychological concept. Appropriate justifications: the fact that Alice bonds with her own body is described in terms of a study on physicality and gender "and remembered that have still parts as to put carefully on the job, but in one or other, so it may increase or it may decrease"

And as a relational unconscious discovery of body required to take into consideration a few clarifying symbols. Remembering the queen (superimposed image in the collective imagination of mother) invoking beheading is an obvious symbol of castration. Then, the lair constitution signified a woman's body in the imaginary speech and, not least, the presence of a sexually charged obvious animal (cat or mouse – as symbols of genitalia). Alice in Wonderland 's journey is the pretext of dream world exploration, so it establishes a wandering through reader’s own unconscious. To paraphrase Freud, dream would direct and immediate to the unconscious and availability main character toward a world generating symbols that denies rationality establish the architecture of two surfaces significant, of two worlds: a world built conventional (that the rabbit is called rabbit clock – clock and cat – cat due to a convention), and on the other possible world, one in which rabbits wearing the watch, the watch can show however, and those hanging in the way are just some figures on some books or game on a sheet of chess, or otherwise abysmal world dedicated space, integrated oral '… but this time he found on the table a bottle (…) and around his neck was tied a label on the bottle, Drink Me it said, in big letters, printing (…). In any case the bottle was not containing poison, so Alice ventured to a sip, even found it very tasty (have a flavor cherry mixture tarts, cream milk, pineapple, turkey roast, caramel and toast hot with butter), and shortly drank a whole. "

Alice's dream is its own world with content, initially latent, manifesting that: "Alice felt that a catch sleep, but continued to ask, almost dreamily: Cats eats bats? (…) Felt that dozing and had just begun to dream that walks hand in hand with Dinah (…) when buf! It was commemorated on a pile of twigs and dry leaves, and long drop has ended. "

Also, the body is a proof of identity and self: "I wonder if perhaps we were changed overnight? But if you are not the same, then the big question would then be who they are? (…) I'm sure I'm not Ada (…) because it falls on the shoulders her hair in long curls, while mine does not at all curly; And I am sure they are not Mabel, because I know a lot of things (…) It seems that really have been changed to Mabel. "

Personality crisis evolves in the direction of the Oedipal complex, Alice finally identifying the central projection, fantasy castrating mother, usurping Queen: "Well, that's great! And she told. I not expect to arrive so fast Regine and I'll tell you something, Your Majesty – continued dialogue with it its very, in a stern voice (He loves rebuke is) – there is a lazy queen. Queens should have a dignified array.“

The new identity of the main character meets Oedipus complex, the world being governed by the mirage of mirrors. On a dual mirror are forming or deforming identity injury. Alice is built in the image and likeness of the character projections generated by the confrontation between conscious and unconscious.

Next, there have been taken into account traits that imaginary journey of the heroine is constructed as a subterfuge. As a result, there have been references to the framing of the two cards in fantasy literature, coverage often critical studies, observing specific aesthetic worlds ambiguity created by Carroll. Considered a starting point to define the fantastic pure, as well as aesthetic categories related to this strange, fantastic, strange, fantastic, marvelous and miraculous we identified specific characteristics of three of them (fantastic pure, fantastic, strange and fantastic, miraculous) in the novels of Alice. One may approach the first category by specific ambiguity, especially in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, because it is lost in the case of the second adventures of the girl, especially if the first contact of the reader was the first where the mechanism was revealed, but also because the two worlds deconstruct empirical reality by the imagination and creates an anti-reality, where creativity is working on both the logic and the language and common notions of time and space. There is also approached the fantastic-odd in that uncanny happenings are being explained, and finally, because they are the product of experiences dream, and fantastic-miraculous, the novel ends with an acceptance of the supernatural, for Alice, even if she wakes up from the dream, she wonders if she dreamed the Red King.

Also, the games, similar to the dreams, are in the center of happenings, representing a way to penetrate into a higher order of the real world, where one can access the profound knowledge. This quest for deep dimensions of being and of the universe is translated by the writer's fascination for the underground realms, symbol of the subconscious, where Alice enters and in her early adventures. Also, Carroll uses reason and double generality, while the mirror twins Tweedlee beings reveals the possibility that Carroll's heroine is not merely an object of Red King's dream.

Adventures of Alice reveal a figural path followed in the profound search of meaning and of solving internal conflicts, the girl functioning as an effigy vision of Carroll's child, being who combines simplicity and complexity, equipped with a particular understanding of universe. Also, features of allegory are identifiable in characters’ clothes, most anthropomorphic animals wearing apparel and / or Victorian accessories: Dodo is the image of bourgeois vain, carrying a walking elegant stick , the White Rabbit, the embodiment of bourgeois, always running out of time, wearing vest, pocket watch, fan and unfailing and so on. But allegory traits are manifested most strongly by the identity crisis of Alice. Regarding this aspect, it is about the socio-cultural background of the Victorian era and the harmful effects that industrialization and capitalism have had on individuals and which were recorded by the literary discourse of Lewis Carroll by loss of identity suffered by the girl.

Starting from Dominique Maingueneau ethos defined as "an internalization of norms of life",the two Alice books are about human being, but also there are presented three ethical represented by: the author-narrator, as well as Alice and the rest of both worlds’ characters. Interesting here is the meeting of the last two situations. Alice is representative for the Victorian bourgeoisie, through which is being defined the habitus ("art of living", "global manner to act”). Therefore, given the set of values and principles, and expectations, which turns into some worlds that seem to be similar to that of origin (creatures from the world of dreams have specific marks of Victorian society – clothing, accessories, titles and so on), is obviously in conflict with other characters. In this case, it is established a clear difference between the stated ethos and the anti-ethos. Ultimately, however, Alice, whose ethos is identified with the author-narrator, returns to herself, opting for her own values and beliefs and giving up those imposed, while she managed to escape the two worlds. Therefore, deceived expectation gives birth to insomnia and anxiety.

The adventure’s fiction “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” (1872), is a melancholic phantasmagoria articulated during nighttime, crossed unpredictable and hallucinatory shade terrifying (but vague) of each of Bandersnatch or Jabberwock, spectra escaping any attempts to systematically deal. During the second travel (Alice started to penetrate her vision’s inaccessible territories), the girl is a prey to an optical illusion: the more fantasy tried to approach pursued in the mirror, the more removed it. The7. area is catoptrical and it has treacherous lures and deepens the confusion, wandering in a maze of spectral reflexes to relentlessly deliver a final (and fatal) traps (that Alice will not heal even after returning from self-induced reverie): the revelation that she herself is (or – more subtle excruciating! – and it may well be) just a ghost, a reflection devoid of substance, life, reality, illusion generated an experimental free reason, impersonal and abscons, feeding on apories.

Alice goes through a variety of mental changes in an absurd manner. The discomfort she feels because that is never a right size that can be seen as a symbol of the changes that occurs during adolescence, at puberty. Alice finds these changes tragic, frustrating and sad, and she has feels of discomfort while her experience. She strives to maintain a comfortable psychological level. In the first chapter, she gets upset when she saw the too large or too small enterance to the garden. In Chapter 5, she loses control over certain parts of her body when the neck grows in an exaggerated manner.

Alice collides with some puzzles that seem to have no clear solution. They imitate the ways in which life betrays expectations, but Alice expect situations to have a sense, a logical thread, but repeatedly she do not understand Wonderland. Alice tries to solve the riddle, to understand the Hatter, the Queen's croquet game but to no avail. In any case, riddles and challenges to which it is subject Alice have no purpose or response. Alice learns that there is no logic or understand in such situations she encounters. Carroll emphasizes the relativity of life so that puts us in difficulty and especially when the problems seem familiar or easy to solve.

Alice was repeatedly in situations where she risked her life. But how these threats do not materialize, they suggest that there may be death in any ridiculous situation, being something to all present and possible life. The theme of death appears from the first chapter, while Alice assumes certain risks that could kill her, but she does not see death as something real, threatening. In time, she begins to realize that her experiences in Wonderland are far more dangerous than they appear. When the Queen asked cutting head, she understands that Wonderland is not necessarily a place where expectations are cheated repeatedly. Death begins to resemble a real threat and Alice assumes the risks and there are not necessarily ridiculous and absurd.

The action in the two novels takes place during the dream so real characters and phenomena of the subconscious elements mix with the girl. Explaining why the dream abundance of senseless events during Alice’s stories, as a dream, the narrator follows the girl who meets various episodes in which she tries to interpret her experiences in relation to herself and her life. Alice quickly discovers that during his trip only tangible aspect of Wonderland is even expectations that they will be betrayed. The girl desires to frame experiences in a logical frame, even if the connection between cause and effect remains unmet.

2.4 Symbolic value of characters as human typologies

Sentimental, generous and prone to fusion character, but advised to adopt a cerebral and sober model based on an extreme rigor (which, in all honesty, he consider it to be ideal), Lewis Carroll "hands over" gradually (and predictable) to his unleashed imagination that could not be contained and constrained by narrow patterns of the aseptic rationalism celebrated by Victorians. The universe of his first "escape" in fiction, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), is a clear solar one, but kept sealed in the secured agreement of miraculous, the imaginary being labeled as a simple (and harmless) oneiric adventure "decoded" explicit and suddenly. Later, however, bizarre and worrisome signs do not only multiply the horizon of his writings, but after a conscious (and courageous) choice, they are more methodical protected from the spared common type streamlining and meaningless the sought consistently beyond the threshold logic common.

The two adventures of Alice in Wonderland and in the land of mirrors, are some of the most popular books of literature for children of all ages (translated into numerous languages, including Esperanto and Latin), their British writer Lewis Carroll securing a prominent place among writers and being known worldwide.However, although the place it occupies in this type of literature is well deserved, both Alice's adventures far exceed that classification. The truth is that the two books have a plurality of layers and substrates that can be understood and appreciated by different categories of readers. Thus lecturers of those experienced early ages are fascinated by diverse elements and characteristics of both worlds created by Lewis Carroll. This feature of the British writer’s work is making the imaginary to be so unique and original period through the literature it belongs to and in this respect, many of the techniques used, the structures, sizes, characters and events created are reminiscent of specific next century literature and art, namely modernism, surrealism and postmodernism.

The preference Carroll manifests for the dream world and for its specific structure of surrealism, along with the insanity dictate to explore language and logic, spatial and temporal boundaries. These issues prompted him to consider this current representative, not its precursor in the common definition of the term, but a humanist from another century who thought the same way.

Thus, in the two books written by Carroll, the initiation appears distorted and imaginary, where the centerpiece is a child with ingenuity, openness and curiosity at specific dimensions that determine to access the unknown, but also gives the ability to do this. Transgression the heroine experiences is closely related to the deep crisis affecting an existential issue. Also, the two works introduce the reader into the hallucinating atmosphere from generating that sleep plays a key role and leading to blending reality with dreams and shape of imaginary, populated by unusual creatures. In the end, the same goal of both novels is that of restoring the imagination, the mystery and the magic specific to surface areas by sending the reader beyond the concrete reality.

Regarding the creatures that inhabit two worlds, they are, with few exceptions, either anthropomorphic animals or characters-pieces or cards. Their symbolism is extremely complex. Thus, the White Rabbit and the March one is closely related to the oneiric world and the invisible one, the first attracting the heroine in Wonderland and the second inviting her to taste hidden or unseen things. The Caterpillar has a key role in the recovery of Alice’s identity, because it helps to control the bodily changes, while the Griffin, the False turtle, the Lion and the Unicorn are fabulous monsters, which in these dimensions, seem to have more reality than Alice herself, who apparently dreams. On the other hand, the Queens, the Duchess and the Dove are anti-female models but also humane ones, dominated by either anger or hysteria or silliness, while the Kings are more than their partners, formal authorities that attempts, however, to impose their domination. Even time becomes a character in Wonderland, a whimsical and impulsive, but, through which, the British writer seeks to emphasize the subjective quality of its opposing in utilitarian Victorian period.

Alterity issues raise inevitable and duplicity, so the British writer is quite delicate. His presence at the textual level is identifiable not only as the narrator, but under the guise of characters such as the Cheshire Cat, the White Knight and the reminiscent Dodo. In all three cases, though each carries different meanings, the Cheshire cat is extremely poignant and rebellious, Dodo was a gentleman with a dose of vanity (sanctioned ironic narrator), which, however, does not prevent it acts as an adjuvant in the adventures of the heroine, and the White Knight embodying a fumble and nostalgic Don Quijote, the author revealing his tendency to unmask formal authority, abuse of power, didacticism and pragmatism. Thus, despite his biography, showing him as a Victorian gentleman model, except in the last years of his life and the moments in which devote all his friends children, he shall bring to light through the characters, subversive tendencies towards non-value and hypocrisy.

In addition, the characters are reduced to their objects provided by the heroine herself who, at the end of the first book exclaims: "Who cares about you? […] You are only a pack of cards!"

Reducing the human being to a mere mechanism, its reiteration is accompanied by another type of degradation, the traits of animal creatures are presented in other fantastic literary works. Some of Carroll’s characters are appearances of birds. White Rabbit wearing vest, pocket watch and gloves, always running out of time, announcing a possible regression of man can always rushed. Then there are intermediate beings, concerning foolishly sky, of which all characters betray the crisis of the modern man, threatened by decay.

The world of servants can be found in two books where Carroll satirizes some bourgeois values, behaviors and attitudes: the White Rabbit in Alice confuses with his housekeeper, considering only an appearance, the Duchess is a frivolous mother, concerned with social events and hating her child who finally, is metamorphosed into a pig, while the Dove is a representation of Victorian overly protective and hysterical mother whose sole purpose is to protect a nest of snakes (erotic substrate is evident here)and so on. In the case of Carroll, one cannot talk only about the world bourgeoisie, but also about the man of his time and the crisis he faces. In his books, Carroll has made an obsessive hierarchy and a more obsessive desire for power, to dominate, suppress and therefore, violence and tyranny that abounds in the fantasy world. According to Jean Jacques Lecercle, this aspect is the most apparentin the discussion that Humpty Dumpty has with Alice, in the scene of process.The only purpose of the process is to find out the truth and justice divide and also, to establish a hierarchy in which the king's authority imposes and he proclaims himself, once again, lord over the rest of the inhabitants in Wonderland. The King's Speech, questions they addressed, assertions and conclusions reached by circumventing the truth and fairness of applying rhetoric and "sophistication terminology, relying on the ignorance of others, to dominate. Thus, he wants to rule the verdict immediately after the reading of the indictment, intimidate witnesses by personal observations, irrelevant to the process, or allegations of theft tossed haphazardly, and uses his power, including the language, in order to get rid of unwanted witnesses as happens with Alice. Since this had risen and threatening to become king, it frame a law, the law no. 42 that, due to her height, Alice must leave the courtroom. But this abuse of power turns against the king, for when the heroine refuses to leave and says the creation of the law in place. But the logic of defeat and the abuse of King turns against him: his reasoning and language betrays him, as if it were the oldest law ought to be the first on the language issues; logic will return, but more later. What is important at this point is highlighted by Carroll’s arbitrary legislative process, which disregards human beings for granted precedence rules imbued with artificiality and whim of an oppressive force eager for power.

Creatures in Wonderland and in the land of mirrors are particularly violent in conversation. Indeed, on several occasions Alice feels physically threatened by Duchess and especially by the Queen that threatens everyone with beheading, when Carroll ratio master-servant takes place at dialectically . Thus, the dialogue is presented as a battle, and utterance seems ready to be replaced at any time with physical violence.Alice is constantly assaulted by characters that correct, contradict, their comments are rude and they seem not to care at all for the rules of fair conversations based on coworktion, respect, courtesy, quality, truth, empathy. Such is the case in the mad tea scene from Alice in Wonderland, in which, the heroine, who tried to carry a polite conversation with the three characters, amounts insulted and disgusted at the table and she leaves. The same happens in the realm of mirrors when she meets two twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, which although Alice suggests several times that she could not stay long, they decide to tell her not the most beautiful poetry they know, but the longest one. In fact, creatures of these worlds not only take account of Alice, but seeks to be imposed as a rule, for when the relationship between the interlocutors seems to balance, one of the characters of the fantasy world provides a replica what Alice again, automatically, put her in a position of inferiority.

Analysed in the symbolistic essence of their epic interior mechanism, both texts can be considered some narratorial mirror glances, not only by what it means in Alice’s situation in redefining her individuality, but especially in terms of mirroring in a perpetual way, each character in the multiplicity of existence (cat in its various manifestations of existence, twins, poems that Alice must recite, dance and banquet, mirror tree).Each of them live and is expressed like something in front of a huge mirror seasonings, searching in Double or reflected a sort of existential balance. If space during her "underground" ego began with slipping through the hollow tree in her comeback left real recovery occurs through the mirror and saving, like redemptive tears.

The false turtle teaches readers that appearances may cheat. Gryphonthat "guards treasures" combines the two plans, terrestrial and celestial, leading the girl to false turtle, who shows "quadrille lobsters", with whom there is a scene of "music" where everyone sings, magical atmosphere governing this stage. Purple Cheshire cat guides Alice in this world and became a symbol of feline later appeared in animated films. It represents human character flaws, being sly, flattering. In spite of this, the cat turns out to be but a reliable friend.

Degradation of human beings is suggested by animal traits of the characters, which is a satire of bourgeois, unimaginative puppet. Cleavage is being suggested by the presence of couples who are permanent assault, as Alice, who claimed to be two people. This aggressiveness is caused by the desire for power. This aggressiveness is caused by the desire for power, which grows up to tyranny, Carroll's heroine constantly being verbally assaulted by other creatures.

The identity crisis faced by Alice when seen surrounded by miraculous creatures, wanting to metamorphose herself in order to not be different from others, supports the idea that the soul is opposed to external aggression, refusing to be shaped. Finally, Carroll's heroine will rise against authority, without being able, however, to escape from this world.

Also, the time is a fantastic , but also ideal character of childhood, where the hours seem to Dali's dripping clocks. This effect is achieved by very pun, creating the impression that these novels are like a maze that is constantly rebuilding. In the presence of narrator, the Time character can be appeased, so as to make for hours every wish.

CHAPTER 3. GROWTH- A TRANSITION FROM CHILDHOOD TO MATURITY

3.1 Challenging Victorian girlhood in Lewis Carroll’s fairy tales

Over a hundred years ago, through the poems and stories of Lewis Carroll, children had the opportunity to visit the magical world, where the rules of the logic are forgotten, where no one behaves as expected, where nobody can do what he/she is said to. Although Lewis Carroll wrote the adventures of Alice in Wonderland for children’s entertainment, many researchers have sought to discover the influences that stand at the basis of his works. His books have been explained from all points of view: Freudian influences, mathematics, political satire, even those of Drugs influence (the effects of drug consumption). Even psychoanalysts have tried secret keys by interpreting the symbolist abstruse of Charles Dodgson Lutwige’ s literature depending on its real or supposed complexes. The books of this author have always been favourite topics for analysis, as their story lends itself to various interpretations.

From the definitions of the wonderful world, I like the one that says magic is the rule and if Carroll was guided by something, was not by convention, and went to study the classics, but took his hat and pulled it all the elements to form the wonderland: a rabbit with a watch, a smiling cat, letters and his kingdom, auction crazy characters, a girl who constantly and the most wonderful characters you can imagine changing. Magic is not an intruder, it is essential to create the created element. Does not destroy the world, but complements

The universe of the absurd or miraculous country beyond the mirror doubles the real world. It is a sort of anti-universe created with a remarkable consistency, worthy of some a strict logician. Lewis Carroll does not neglect any detail in the description of this opposite world. The memory runs, here, in a different direction : heroes recall facts before they have taken place; objects and creatures tend to typical asymmetrical forms: animals in the cork, paths in the cork, in general frequent hints at corkscrew structure in the helical asymmetrical spiral, regarding the profiles of the right and left-hand. In this absurd universe of the full process, after distinguishing the world of cards, Alice flees… waking up. The tension reached the critical point. The nightmare did a Sabbath of characters. The dream had turned against the dreamer. The chimeras shattered by the revolt of the Fearless Alice, representing consistency (although tempted by demons, tattered sometimes by bad spells) of common sense, of reason and of humor. Alice joins the revolt against the Queen and her world: “Who cares about you?… You are only a deck of cards.” This revolt triggers the chaos, a revelation of the world of the books of the game, respectively the rebellion of the author. Alice, a little girl with strange imagination, penetrates in two fantastic and gorgeous worlds, in which she finds that nothing is what it seems. Over the two trips, Alice passes through all sorts of unusual events.

The absurdity and literary nonsense are a bit more complex than in a first reading, it can be perceived terms. The absurdity is full of paradoxes that convert excess meaningless nonsense. The paradox is understood as defined Maria Moliner: "Expression that there is an apparent inconsistency is resolved in a deeper thinking than the states, and he who has nothing has it all" The little Alice is who experiences the absurd in the Country of the Wonders, as she is foreign, which will be taught all customs of the natives of this strange territory; and will feel more hard because you will find yourself alone with no one to support her previous perceptions of reality, their logical perceptions of the world. Gustavo Arango expressed in the quoted text: “The condition most conducive to experience the feeling of absurdity is perhaps loneliness. The absurdity lurks in the lonely places. When the collective is disintegrates and loses strength when individuals seem doomed to follow on their own, without the comfort of a family, a belief, an ideology, absurd unfurls its colors” Similarly, Alice in Wonderland can be catalogued as an absurd literary work, it meets the three elements that are considered characteristic of the literature of nonsense: the plot is arbitrary behavior of his characters is completely erratic, plus their dialogue and narration are chaotic.

The poetical concerns of the romantic English novelists of experience about childhood and its importance in the evolution of personality, with particular impressions about teenage silliness, will be continued and transposed in prose by a considerable number of authors of the Victorian age. In his books, Carroll speaks about real childhood, because a child has the right to dream.

In his article, Snider (2006) states that could be considered Alicia as the image of the bore of the same Carroll. Jung, in his essay the Archetypes and the collective unconscious, explains that "the child is a symbol that unites the opposites; one mediator, one who brings healing, one that makes one (whole)”. To Alicia is credited much this sense of unity, holism, represented at the opposite of white and red flowers in red and white queen and union between these, for example, it laps. Also, within this holism, according to Snider (2006), is its logical nature it represents. Alicia is who tries to unite what Jung called the feminine principle, Eros, with the male, Logos. The feminine is natural nature while the male is perceived in its continuous logic, in its constant reasoning. Furthermore, according to Snider (2006) and other authors, Alicia lives in constant building herself. This is evident throughout the story as she tries even remember who he is or as it is called, questioning whether it is still the same. Snider (2006) explains that Alicia tasks are to build your ego, expand its consciousness, the realization of his Self, his personal myth. He also explains that through the story is going witnessing the development of Alice in what Jung calls the functions of consciousness which leads to demonstrate growth of Alice’s conscious self.

Highly productive for other nations, Great Britain has become the world manufacturer, this being showed by means of the Great Exhibition in 1851 and maintaining its position until the end of the century. The speed of changes emphasized the negative aspects of the non-hygienic shelters for workers, using children for different works, in poor work conditions , low wages and at long hours. This aspect is reflected in the work of Carroll, especially in the context in which Alice comes into contact with the White Rabbit and she is mistaken as his servant.

Closely linked to the real world of childhood is the game, dominated by the power of imagination and creativity and the two Alice books abound in game’s elements such as imagination, creativity and so on. The game, as well as the dream, occupies the foreground of the three books, for in the adventures of Alice not only are the characters taken from the poems, songs or games for children, (Humty Dumpty, brothers Tweedledee and Tweedledum, games or Alice itself, the Council’s racecourse or the chess game in the second Alice’s book), but their entire structure is based on the game: with the language improved with logical elements (quote), with common rules specific to the real world, with the prospects and so on(quote).

The game is an element of childhood, both in Carroll’s art and in the Victorian reality. The game, together with the dream, are located in the centre of everything else that had happened, representing a way to penetrate an order top of the real world, where they can be accessed with profound knowledge. This concern for the dimensions of the deep universe is translated through a fascination of the novelist for the outlands of groundwater, symbol of the subconscious mind, where Alice got in during her first adventure. Also, Carroll uses the theme of duality and gemelarity, while at the same time, in the mirror land, Twins Tweedle are those who reveal Alice’s possible fear that she might be nothing more than an object of the dream of the King Red. The Paradise of a baby is the paradise of the world, also an element of the game. The privileged space is that of the game land and the time is their own – as in the cosmologic model of his Sitter – an eternal stationary- size.

Furthermore, , the game has an extraordinary creative power, a simple spell of words being enough to lead to their materialisation. Thus, when talking with the white King of the Mirror land about the messenger, Haigha, Alice, starting from a game for children, appoints three objects that begin with the same letter as the departure’s name The Brothers Tweedlee question the reality of the fearless, affirming that this, in the whole world of the Mirror, as a matter of fact, is nothing more than the contribution figments of Red King, Carroll taking over the idea of George Berkeley according to which the material world is just a manifestation of divine consciousness, lacking concrete existence.

Carroll has a predilection for childhood (which is used to access life unusual dimensions, and, in the case of the two Alice’s books, in addition, adolescence is close to childhood by the force of biology to the detriment of the concentration of ripening, considering the child as having power and imaginative opening, while the world is still material supported by biological transformations and social influence. ,

In the same context, one should mention the fact that the writer chooses the summer season specific to childhood, (as Alice’s adventures in the first book are taking place in this season), at the same time as the winter is specific to the age of maturity (such action in the second book Alice, much more full of nostalgia and more intellectualized than the first).
Alice, a little girl who was scarcely twelve years old, at the exit from childhood (because then girls usually have their first menstra), has a gift to discover, through the dream and game, a land where there is Everything. The heroine of Carroll is very greedy, an aspect which marks many some children.

Beyond this, Alice, the character, shows the same curiosity and fascination for what she might discover through dreams and games like any child . However, arriving at maturity in the second book, Alice thinks that this adventure was "the one thing to believe that came to the world, for which that individual has been chosen". Probably as thought, Alice Liddell, the one who inspired Carroll in his creations, emerged from anonymity and remained in people’s attention, only through her connection with the two Alice books.

For example, according to Andrei Bodiu, “the age of childhood is no longer […], one of pure innocence, for, though it remains a fascinating territory that can hide certain behaviour features.

Indeed, Alice betrays sometimes gestures or attitudes of Victorian adolescent girls, while the characters of the two books give proof of cruelty and injustice. The Queen was a cruel person and she wanted to punish all her visitors. However, here there appears the idea of the author’s identity as a creator, finally, in these worlds and dreams, with the characters which he created, including Alice, identification of which could be the source of the girl’s dark childhood. But, finally, the writer makes an apology of childhood’s age through which some poems open and conclude the two Alice books, where childhood is depicted as a golden age.

Lewis Carroll's stories propose spaces essentially different in structure and potentialities from our world. Carroll’s cultivated paradox emphasizes his strangeness worlds and led to various speculations which largely concerns are centered in Carroll's mathematical thinking.

Clorinda, as a subject of enunciation, writes from his status as "workers of thought", he made an apology for work as a fundamental factor in the progress of the nation and postulates the major role that it occupies in the working woman. Still strongly rooted in the principles of Spencerian positivism raises the dichotomy progress = order vs. reverse = disorder strikes. Therefore it holds:

“However. If, as Spencer says, a society is an organism, its development and growth depend on the characters that constitute it, as such, our working society is already in the fullness of life and can give existence to other agencies or encourage perfection those who remain stationary or weak, as plants sapless born in the shadow of which little has to wait for national progress. (…) Physical strength and intellectual force, in intimate consortium, move the giant wheel of human progress, and strikes are convulsions that stop at times that wheel, no positive benefit to anyone”

Alice as she seeks for herself of her real identity, lies in the plane of disorder’s representation. Children often show ambivalence and nonsense, becoming a necessity for spiritual growth. When becoming more confused and not knowing how to differentiate trivial things, Alice drinks the bottle and awaits change: "Now nothing but pretend to be two people. Now, is hardly enough for me to be one person in the world. "

3.2The rabbit hole- a journey in a single direction

What is really the wonderland where Alice enters in the dream, shining in the hole of a rabbit? A universe in a fairy tale, or of a fairy tale? A plan, an abyssal pessimism, of unconscious? Is it the Land of the unreal in which potential expands its scope forever? The space in which lovely Alice is located close to the center of the earth (to which she is heading and other heroes entering another world), falling into the ground as well as fiction heroine of Frank Baum: Dorothy and the wizard in Oz. In fact "Wonderland" is made after the topography of Lewis Carroll’s garden. In the realm beyond the Mirror, another region in which Alice enters (through the Looking-Glass), the space which opens beyond a room and a garden represent a huge checked area. The realm of mirrors has a miraculous part, that of everyday reality, but in a different order, according to some absurd rules. There is a marvelous rehearsal that distorts the natural. At the entrance in Wonderland, Alice finds a way of life and reasoning quite different from hers. Even if there is a duchess who is determined to find a moral in everything. But during the journey through Wonderland, Alice learns something more: to understand the adult world ( proof? Argument? Without it, it sis just an empty claim based on gut feeling) . In fact, while she is growing, she herself matures. This is also represented by physical changes suffered during the story – growing and decreasing in size.

Falling down the rabbit hole, Alice slips through a dark tunnel, on whose side walls are visible shelves with books, paintings, maps, some of the world scholastic utensils or a jar of marmalade that the heroine snatches while passing. Arriving in a closed room, seen through the only door that can be opened, but that cannot pass through, Alice discovers a garden with flowers and fountains, an Eden. So, she sees – at some distance – huge field of chess, which, after overcoming certain obstacles, will walk. Alice had a heavenly vision: “It's a huge game of chess” – exclaimed the little girl thrilled – “playing in the world, if it's all over the world”.

And here, a passage from subconscious to unconscious is outlined. In first instance, it is about the duality of the characters in the adventures of Alice in Wonderland, whose protagonist "was eager to be two persons", one of which is the childish Alice, and the other is the one who gives advice and transcripts in the world of dreams It is, of course, all about the dual structure involvoing elements of the human being. Also, it is about the inner conflict triggered by the clash of contrary composed elements, this aspect being resumed in the case of other characters from the outer worlds created by the writer, where the reason for duality is closely linked to the price of the mirror and of the gemelarity.

At this level, that of the experience of supra-individual space exploration onto an abyssal pessimism, the oneiric shall designate through Alice’s trip as a formation of a compromise product. The size is called upon to satisfy simultaneously, two contradictory instances: the desire aware of himself as part of the psychic system, be governed by the conscious and, on the other hand, mindless nature of the desire the unconscious recorded in the form of tendencies, phantasms, symbolic images that belong to the dream.

Alice’s journey in Wonderland is the pretext of the scan of the world of dreams, therefore should be established as an ethnical through its own unconscious state. According to Freud, “the dream would be established as a path directly and immediately” by the unconscious state and availability is the main character in front of a world-generating symbols that refuses to rationality establishing the architecture of the two significant areas, ] two worlds: a world built in a conventional manner (the one in which the rabbit is called the rabbit, the clock, clock, the cat, cat – due to a Convention), and one characterized by possibility, where the rabbit’s clock shows him he is always late, and those in the shims are just some figures on some books or on a blackboard or chessboard, or otherwise the world dedicated to the space has an abyssal pessimism, oral integrated: “…But this time has found on the table a bottle (…) and around its neck was linked a label on which was written the DRINK ME, in capital letters, (…).”

Like Alice who falls into the hole that seems endless, the reader can feel the abruptness of the fall unexpectedly, but at the same time takes the time to remember the cultural baggage that we have, and like Alice, admires books and maps that he sees in the fall. But often this baggage outside the book loses its relevance, is as unimportant as latitude and longitude Alice reached by the end of fall. Once landed, Alice starts tracking the white Bunny, which invariably escapes. If one were to liken Wonderland with a text, they tend to like White Rabbit with its always an elusive purpose. Then the whole scene in which Alice is trying various doors, all being closed, she finds the key only from the one through which she had not herself fits. One may be to strengthen this idea of the need for adaptation to the reader. There, useless key opens the door to the following if one is too big or too small. The solution seems to appear only after the spill the tears of frustration through the observation of the fact that the door opening we actually is required. The following are simply walks, scans of the world in which Alice entered , and once she adapted to it, the story of the fake tortoises, the lobsters, the croquet game of the queen, the tea served with the mad Hatter have no hidden meaning, they are meant to be enjoyed for their progress. Alice comes to have a surprised attitude, but however commiserated with strange vision of Wonderland. By this status of surprise doubled by a feeling of normality, the text seems to say that the reader has mastered its rules and those of the world in which Alice has entered and she can now enjoy it with a sense of belonging, even in the absence of it. Suddenly, White Bunny changes its meaning; it no longer represents the meaning that the reader who came unexpectedly in Wonderland runs for, but is lost in the multitude of illogical elements of this universe. The meaning of the white bunny is no longer a desideratum, a simple exploration of the text, and the reader does not search for it to get to prevail in such an approach.

Alice has some attempts to impose a logical structure of the discussions which it has with the various creatures from Wonderland, but forbore she sees the lack of any pictures, in this respect. The discussion with the caterpillar seems to be edifying in this respect. Through its replies formulated logic, but devoid of fact of any relevance and content and somewhat and thus apparent logic, the Caterpillar summarizes the mechanism of the land of wonders. The only thing worthy of being taken seriously in its discourse is the advice according to which one should never lose his temper. The events that have the logic only inside the world of the book culminate with the process ridiculous in which investigates the theft of three tart shell. Find out the actual of the defendant is continuously deferred by lack the structure and direction of the actions of those involved in the process, to investigate the facts of the seeming to do just for the sake of the investigation.

In fact "Wonderland" is made after the topography of Lewis Carroll of only a few rooms and a garden. In the land beyond the mirror, other have region in which Alice penetrates (Through the looking-glass), the space which opens beyond a room and a garden is a huge area like a chess board. The miraculously repeated, in part, to that of the reality of the everyday tasks, but in an order, in accordance with rules of the absurd. Miraculous is a repetition of the distorted natural, with a previously undergone.

The world separated from Alice when she comes into the rabbit hole constitutes a rigid space in which social norms are strongly drawn toward to link as the most powerful agreement between man and world. In this reality of ordinary world, the individual is docked to the system according to the countless rules, in order to remain placed in what one may define, as a general rule, normality. Instead, Wonderland describes a subjective reality, the spirit, the metaphysical horizon in which the natural character is given by the illusory and by the ability of the man to project beyond the reality of the possible. For this reason one may treat this metaphysic reality, of imaginary facts, as the only suitable to explain the truth. The normality will hold the false projection about how is the world. When the Alice decides to follow the white rabbit, she takes part to everything, an excursion until then, based on miraculous and some values on which until then she denied. Now everything becomes more curious. Tended by the self-overrun, the only way to acquire is to be cast in the universe of miraculously in which Alice is introduced by the rabbit. “The overrun represents the trend of self-projection in a transpersonal universe, but and, assuming a projection in the imaginary (…) either a speculation intellect who can think beyond the possible reality of the world objective, a metaphysic reality.”

Therefore, the entry in the hole corresponds to the output of normality, exceeding that systems had made up until then the way of Alice’s being as one heavily influenced by the moral and social values of Victorian Era. Apart the rabbit hole, the mirror, symbol of knowledge allows Alice to pass through it in order to reach beyond its dimension, which apparently is identical to that of concrete reality, only to later prove to be a world full of profound meanings. Here, Carroll's heroine encounters two brothers, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, taken over by the British writer of poetry for children, and moreover, the two appear to be the mirror image of another, this being pointed at paratextual level through illustrations made by John Tenniel. Slipping them on those realms means, in fact, Alice falls into the inner self to a space "unknown" where she must face her fears and anxieties, and feeling "forgotten self" is one sense that deeply marks the "maturity". This state of being between two worlds is the sign of outbreak of Alice, while she has an identity crisis.

The Symbolism of tree’s hollow is related to an element through which Alice enters the unknown space of her own ego, which can be treated as an axis mundi between real (area) and imaginary (underground), rebuilt in the image mirror in the second trip (beyond the mirror). If in his first descent into self, Alice experienced the intensity of anguish, she feared primary unknown in the second initiatory trip, meeting a character who has overcome fears and inner demons and matured thanks to the gaze into his own mirror, and with this, recognition of his identity. Significant for this separation and retrieving old self in a new and more complete form, through self-knowledge, the new self-representations are more reiterative that unite the two writings and offers symbolic transformation of the main character.

As a major work belonging to the literature of the absurd, history of Alice may be – and was – considered a vast parable of the human condition, or as a tale of symbols and allegories, as a writing initiative, indicating a spiritual journey or a simple game of imagination.

3.3 The matter’s ascent and compulsion

Alice is in relation with her own body, described in terms of a study on physicality and gender while she remembered that „she still had in hands parts of mushroom, […] biting either one or other, so that either grew or shrank”.

Her whole body is the evidence of self-identity: “I wonder if I changed overnight? But if I am not the same, then the big question would then be who am I? […] I'm sure I'm not Ada […] because her hair falls on her shoulders in long curls, while mine is not at all curly; and I'm sure I am not Mabel, because I know a lot of things […] It seems that I really changed with Mabel”.

Personality crisis is evolving towards the Oedipal complex, Alice finally identifying with the central projection, fantasy castrating mother, usurping the Queen: “Well, that is great! she said. I did not expect to get Queen so quickly and I have to tell you, Your Majesty – continued dialogue with itself, a stern voice (much liked to scold) – not to make a queen to idleness. The queens must be dignified."

The new identity conformation of the central character meets Oedipus complex world governed by the mirage of mirrors. In this respect, a dual mirror appears as forming or deforming the body identity. Alice is constructed as an image character and projections likeness generated by the confrontation between conscious and unconscious.

Study concerning physicality and gender is possible by means of calling the unconscious fantasies as a variant of accessing the originating knowledge of Alice's own body (respectively an oedipal complex of usurping the role; symbolic castration – by invoking beheaded psyche complex – as a political mental designating the architectural identity and multiple hypostasis of the protagonist); the presence of a legitimate symbolic structure fabrics psychology abysmal (respectively the presence of dedicated symbols or images invested with specific meanings: the queen, animal characters, cave, knight and so on).

References about food from Alice’s adventures were noted and discussed at length by previous analysts. Basically, her subsequent development starts from food. Apart from the tarts or turtle soup presence, there can be mentioned Eat Me and Drink Me tags causing bodily changes while fantasy starring forcing Alice to increase or decrease depending on the whims in the realm of Wonderland. Also, consuming the mushroom that Mr. Caterpillar sat on, Alice is able to control the shape of her body and returns to her original stature. Finally, in the Land of Mirrors, at the coronation banquet is serving a speaking cake, complaining the audacity about being cut. Some authors have discussed these references related to food and devouring it, stressing the connection between food consumption and sexuality . In this respect, gender analysis type studies have explored the connection between image and devouring in adventures context of Alice’s female representation. Figures such as the Queen's of Cup and the Duchess were connected to a monstrous feminine, contrary to the image of idealized feminine retained and controlled in the Victorian era. As Lewis Carroll himself said in an article about the adventures of Alice in Wonderland, Queen of Cup is "the embodiment of an irrepressible craving – rage and senseless” . The excessive Queen of Cup tyrannizes her servants and the king and the illustrations images are very similar representations of Queen Victoria’s era, whose voluminous body contrasted with the slim silhouette and constrained by the Victorians considered to be an ideal. Queen of Cup is a monstrous figure able to commit crimes if there is an uncontrolled indulgence, as the episode of Duchess’ tarts, when her speech was related to the influence of food on behavior such as pepper or sweets, appears as an extension of it. Duchess is still an image of femininity re-embodiment in an authoritative adult as a Circe who transformed his baby in a piglet. These representations of adult femininity contrast with the infantile body idealized by Alice who begins to experience an increased appetite (a good example is the episode in which she wants to devour the speaking cake), barely “Through the Looking Glass”, a book written when Alice Liddell had already begun to mature.

While Alice was living the adventure of her life, poetry of the little crocodile seems to emphasize evolutionary references, presenting a harsh world where ferocity has its place and everything becomes a competition for survival. Incidentally, in Carroll's universe, animals lend human traits, but also may serve simply as an utility: flamingos are used as putters and hedgehogs as balls. Alice hits the Bill itself, the Baby lizard, and she seems undisturbed by the rough treatment of cavies and look quite pleased to mention the mouse that she has a cat named Dinah. Moreover, in many illustrations, including those made by John Tenniel, Alice is represented as having the size of a mouse while floating on the lake of tears. This, of course, makes readers to think that in an universe where you have to devour in order to not be devoured, Alice's cat, Dinah, might consider a new prey.

The small size of the door and the heroine’s failure to go through it, although is offered a golden key to open it, and both food and beverage miraculous that help to change its dimensions, are elements that might be translated into Alice’s failing in a world of imagination, where the rules of reality are not valid. Only after overcoming several stages leading to a loss of identity, followed by its recover, but an enriched one, Alice succeed in getting through, this door being equivalent to the symbol of the girl’s initiation to a stage of higher knowledge. Having a similar meaning, the mirror is not only a gateway to the world beyond the mirrors, but also a tool for accessing a deeper understanding of the existence.

In this story, food is used as a metaphor of growth, of maturation. Carroll plays with the idea of complying about food which helps her to grow big and strong, while one may consider that it is the way to adulthood. Ironically, Carroll also highlights the fact that physical development is only a half of adulthood’s road. Alice cannot control her size, so neither her position in adulthood. The food can make Alice grow in Wonderland (living well), but only experience can make her become wise.

In “Alice in Wonderland”, Alice goes through a variety of absurd mental changes. The discomfort felt by the little girl because she never had the right size can be seen as a symbol of the changes that occur during adolescence, changes of puberty. Alice finds these changes to be tragic and she feels frustration, sadness and discomfort while she experiences. It strives to maintain a comfortable psychological level. In the first chapter, she gets upset when she is too large or too small to enter the garden. In chapter five, she loses control over certain parts of her body when the neck grows in an exaggerated manner. Alice quickly discovers that during her trip, the only tangible aspect of Wonderland is represented by the idea that her expectations will be betrayed. Girl's desire to frame experiences in a logical context, in order to make the connection between cause and effect, remains unsatisfied.

But during the journey through Wonderland, Alice learns something more: to understand the adult world. In fact, she herself is growing, maturing her own live. This is also represented by physical changes suffered during the story – increase and decrease. All (metamorphoses beings, fabulous nature, artifice, play, reasoning, semantic) is guided by the logic of the absurd. The reason of literary metamorphosis (Alice’s avatars are a first attempt associated with the feeling of existential anxiety) appears as a fiction nightmare where disturbances happen. In "Wonderland" Alice assists at a fight between the importance and fragility of personal identity. She is constantly in an attempt to identify creatures she encounters, but she has doubts about her own identity. After passing through the rabbit hole, Alice gives passes through some tests in order to determine if she became another girl. Basically, she has numerous disorders.

Character’s sizes present, like those of Alice during their "telescoping", some paradoxes: a bee proves to be an elephant. Relations between different sizes play the same role, terrifying or funny, as in Gulliver's adventures, for instance: lowered Alice is threatened by an enormous dog. Relations of symmetry-asymmetry are frequent in Carroll’s work, causing the appearance of couples, the double figures. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are twins and enantiomorphism forms (image of each other, in parallel mirrors). These couples announce the obsession for double, for strange pairs. But choosing the mirror motif allows a number of games regarding symmetry’s duplication and also requires a double obsession. Absurd universe or beyond the country's miraculous mirror doubles the real world. It is a type of anti-universe created with a remarkable consistency worthy of a logician.

The idea of growth is also reflected in words that Alice’s sister addressed her, analyzing her dream and the way she explained it, vividly, “she saw in her sister, through mind's eye, sometime in the future, a grown woman ; and conceived how to keep, in all the years of maturity, her kind and loving soul that she had in childhood; and how other children will gather around her, and how she will see in their eyes the bright and curious glance when she will tell them a lot of strange stories, even those about her dream of Wonderland that she had long time ago; and how she will grieve for all their petty troubles, and how she will enjoy all their little joys, remembering her own childhood and the happy summer days of yore”.

According to some visions, it marked the oneiric’ s inferiority, while the dreamer’s experience is incommunicable and subjective, with a surreal character. Even if in a dream there is no other witness apart from the dreamer himself, the experience is in one’s mind, making clear the difference between the two worlds in that the wakefulness is experienced the same for us all. Instead, the mind is released during the sleep and one arrives at the truth. Sleep chains a sensitive part that was able to perceive only the act of wakefulness.

But conclusions can be drawn until the unusual end of Alice's adventures that even among the most grotesque characters, nothing bad happens. Brilliant to suggest how things unfold and dialogues in a dream, the author, Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) concentrated in a few pages a deep meaning of how one should learn to face life – with her oddities, which can become victories and wonders if one knows just how much innocence and wisdom to use in order to face them.

Of all the adventures she lived, Alice understood one thing: once she grows, she do not chooses the roles, but they are imposed on her. Each child life experience helped him in his training as an adult. And the game or the adult is just a premature taste of what will come, respectively the life.

The story of "Alice in Wonderland" is the perfect example of the ambiguous meaning. Written for a girl, this work hides deep psychological symbols. The book refers to the transformations that the child suffers in her passage to adulthood through adolescence.

3.4 Alice’s survival in the confusing world of adults

There are differences between the world of children and the adult world? Comparing the two worlds and experiencing them, one will understand that the intensity is the same, but only the characters are different.

People are imperfect by their own human nature. If people were perfect, they would always feel self-sufficient. They would not need each other. They would not love, they would have sites, they would interact, they would not tie relationships. They would not matter one for each other. Life would be monotonous. And sad. And gray. But people live in polarity, in diversity, in good and evil, with differences, in contradictions, in relationships, in everything that makes human nature to be so special and interesting. People are imperfect. And different. Which is a good thing, an awesome one. Alive. And colorful.

One of the consequences of psychologising in contemporary society is to create a model of ethical therapeutic type, designed to regulate human relationships. Thus, the world of children due to its alleged malleability and the collection of its cultural and crucible education and trainer’s value, is among the most exposed areas in radiation and positivity therapy: everything is going to be fine, namely what happens to an individual plus what happens to him, because they are always good, and if something is wrong, that's one’s view. There is even a new literary genre, the process of acquiring importance in educating children, namely the rational and educational storytelling, in a strident, but often expense literary manner.

In this context, Lewis Carroll’s Alice may only seem outmoded. She does not meet all the good in the world, she does not know to deal with in a classic therapeutic spirit. Others she meets are far from being good to her, and do not shy, and vice versa. One may observe a certain dose of cruelty may be necessary to the fiction about childhood and how that cruelty can generate discrete pedagogies to be achieved through fiction without converting it into a purely discursive tool.

Wonderland’s universe is unknown and incomprehensible and Alice makes it look familiar, logical and certainly very funny … and vice versa – everything that seems to be normal turns out to be the opposite. If Alice can go through life, to live it and make friends, then anything is possible, and the children's imagination can go beyond the limits imposed by the adult world.

For Alice, the real world is a boring adult. In this respect, Alice books showed how absurd the adult world is, and how full of meaningless the rules are. Instead, people down to earth, pragmatic beings who forget the world of imagination have a devoted interest in new automobile brands than in their own minds content.

Alice enters a magical world, without logic, where no one behaves properly or do not do what they say, where a girl grows or shrinks, where a Queen commands relentlessly cutting someone's head, and the rabbit loses his gloves. It is a timeless children's book.

Alice perceives the adults world as a reality different from the place where she adventures. She structures the perception of this reality in her own way, running through a maze of dreams. Alice world that splits when entering the lair of White Rabbit, is a rigid space in which social norms are strongly drawn, to bind as strongly agreement between the individual and the world. Somehow, in this world ordinary reality of the individual is anchored according innumerable rules, staying away as defined usually normality. Wonderland describes a subjective reality, however, the spirit, the metaphysical horizon where the natural character is given by illusory and human capacity to project beyond the possible reality. On one side is the reality secure one where one may dial, there are constant things that one can always rely on; is the area of refuge in case of a nightmare. On the other hand, after a while, one may take away the reality that life is the lack of movement and repose within safe and warm.

In terms of the dynamics of the unconscious collective, Alice appears in a particular context. The context is set by previous generations in circumstances where there is a conflict that needs to be lived and clearly formulated. Only when the terms were clarified, the conflict is approaching the "harvest". Thus, an intuitive person may say a prophet can predict anything from causing a conflict and at the same time, some of the character’s features whose responsibility it is to solve that conflict. This aspect creates prophecies, which always have something to do with solving ancestral conflicts. Putting the issue to the end, conflicts exist from the very beginning of psychic life, but they are not made in an explicit manner, but the two sides of it (good and bad) are almost homogeneously mixed. Thus, Alice has the "duty" to solve a problem that precedes it. Alice has contact with adults both in the world of dreams and the real plan, at home.

Thus, one of the adults that marked her vision about life was the Mad Hatter. For example, the Mad Hatter is a magical and fabulous character, the main character who leads to reality understanding, making Alice to discover the divine truths. Although structurally fantastic through games and rituals, his speech juggles with madness and doubt, while later he shows that the logic of truth can be found even when logic can be illogic. Even if Hatter speaks Alice about things that do nothing to confuse, he tries to integrate her into the world of nonsense either searching for answers to riddles which even the narrator has no answer or allowing politeness and curiosity. How do conversations fail to understand something, it ends up leaving the tea party “whatever happens, do not ever come back to these people! she said, walking through the woods. In my life I never took part in a such thunder-struck tea party! " The Mad Hatter is a customization of madness, as characterized by historically point of view, through characters who embody this way of being.

The Hatter produces an impression designed to make the reader to be precisely touched because he ceases to be human, but he also outlines the extent that an individual has two ways of being. The Mad Hatter is atypical, out of which the reader considers to be normal, because it shows disagreement with the world. He runs representations valued in terms of symbolic and bring faith by himself, to give the reader an objective experience. According to the legend, the concept of the mad hatter comes from the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, when the manufacture of hats was risking for people to poison themselves with mercury, exposing the manufacturers of hats to dementia or other neuroses. The Mad Hatter matches the type of Baroque, where one recognizes the predominance of form over content. He buzzes in conversation, takes readers by surprise because he performs suddenly and chaotic dances. His behavior shows a simple soul and a content of vague outlined experiences, with many fluctuations. Remembering the theater, he is always hysterical and agitated, almost with a manic excitement. However, madness offers the clearest evidence for changing attitudes for interrogations in spiritual world because they introduce exhibit curiosity, anxiety, doubt and a tendency to self-exceed. The Mad Hatter is therefore the epiphany of truth, a truth which Alice must face it.

For Alice, adult’s world was a paradoxical and an absurd one. It seems obvious that while, by its nature, the paradox has a logical aspect, expressed symbolically or not, the absurd does not have such a structure. In other words, the absurd nonsense is always an imaginative linguistic expression lacking any rationalized principle or element. The absurd lies beyond the possible and certainly beyond any probabilistic approach.

In the presence of a paradox, Alice’s mind buzzes, the enthuses exalts its own limits, its own "mess" of the contained funds. Instead, the Alice’s mind may remain perplexing, absurd and disoriented, dazed and confused, she cannot have a controllable reaction.

For Alice, the paradox is a logical limit, while the absurd is a failure of it. The mathematical expression of any limits expresses the infinite. Between plus and minus infinity, between bonum infinitum and malum infinitum limit takes shape, qualities and expression, so the limit can be regarded as the form through which Alice has access to an infinite world that bounds her reveals, on the premises that paradox can be interpreted as a limit.

Alice cannot predict, think or speak the absurd, but she can only observe it in the world of adults she tries to survive. It reveals itself as denial of any rational or logical or intuitive structure. The absurd has its own being and it is never expressed by an act of intermediation. In this respect, between Alice and the absurd there is no other absurd category, no interpreter or mediator element. The presence of the absurd when it is shown to Alice is a total one, as well as linear, without fillers or minuses, without possibility of interpretation one.

The message always remains the same: the existence of a rift between the child Ego and the adult Ego. This message determined Alice to become an incomplete adult, and judged guilty of leaving her "world of wonders", being frightened and complete misfit in the adult world. Alice will not really become an adult until she accepts that she was a child and as becoming adult, she not condemns herself to lose the child within. Being adult does not make Alice guilty as she grew and she entered another world. Being adult is to forgive the fact that she did not know she grow and as she loses a "world of wonders". The adults’ world means giving Alice the child the chance to evolve and become part of it. That part which is reflected in other’s eyes. Because whenever there is a sincere love, Alice could again become a child!

“Alice in Wonderland” helps children become adults and this is done as extraordinary as it can be. At the same time, one may think that this book helps adults to remember the fantastic world of imagination and become children again for a few hours to go beyond the daily routine, mainly because nothing ends with maturity and there are things that can revive the spirit of childhood.

CONCLUSIONS

The two adventures of Alice in Wonderland and in the land of mirrors, are some of the most popular books of literature for children of all ages (translated into numerous languages, including Esperanto and Latin), their British writer Lewis Carroll securing a prominent place among writers and being known worldwide.

The action in the two novels takes place during the dream so real characters and phenomena of the subconscious elements mix with the girl. Explaining why the dream abundance of senseless events during Alice’s stories, as a dream, the narrator follows the girl who meets various episodes in which she tries to interpret her experiences in relation to herself and her life. Alice quickly discovers that during his trip only tangible aspect of Wonderland is even expectations that they will be betrayed. The girl desires to frame experiences in a logical frame, even if the connection between cause and effect remains unmet.

If Alice in Wonderland is a Bildungsroman, a metaphor of the stages that mark the exit from childhood and the initiation into adulthood, the fall in the hole of the Rabbit marks the entry into the world of experience. On the edge of the threshold, during the fall in the hole, Alice sees maps, which together with the time evoked by the White Rabbit give the other coordinated in advance of the world, namely space. And then she sees enticing things such as marmalade. They are things to be desired. Then Alice sees a series of doors, all closed, and a golden key, but it is beyond her capacity to open the doors. The doors are all too big, as big and undefined as the childhood dreams are. She have to find a door reach her dreams. Desire is the engine that drives the action.

The Alice novels , that contains many interpretations, are commonly seen as a metaphor of the growth process. Wonderland allows Alice to shake the state of immobility caused by the severe and boring Victorian education, stimulates her curiosity, the door to look around, to think with her head, to accept that one can be wrong and, anyway, to discover a new part of herself, the one that will take her to reconsider all of her previous certainties and establish new ones, thanks to the characters she meets (the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Queen, the King and so on).

Thanks to the magic mushroom, Alice enlarges and shrinks continually until she loses her sense of identity. But behind her childish figure, she also looms the idea of a new individual, mostly destabilized, involved in constant changes, but freed from the precepts as “it should be”, and warned about the importance of “how it feels”.

The uncertainty of adolescence appears when Alice meets the blue caterpillar sitting smoking with a hookah. This question arrogantly the girl for her identity, to which she replies doubtfully, as having changed several times in stature and does not know who he is. The Blue Caterpillar is the rational logic, doubts and patience as a mother of science.

Alice collides with some puzzles that seem to have no clear solution. They imitate the ways in which life betrays expectations, but Alice expect situations to have a sense, a logical thread, but repeatedly she do not understand Wonderland.

Relegation of Alice down the rabbit hole that seems endless as a recurring nightmare, reminds many people fall and fall until the sense of growing anxiety makes them wake up. Carroll uses this image to describe the entry into the unconscious.

The description of the girl during her growth and the decline in different sizes could reflect the ups and downs of adolescence when they are feeling adults and sometimes, the opposite.

For Alice, adults world was a paradoxical and an absurd one. It seems obvious that while, by its nature, the paradox has a logical aspect, expressed symbolically or not, the absurd does not have such a structure. In other words, the absurd nonsense is always an imaginative linguistic expression lacking any rationalized principle or element. The absurd lies beyond the possible and certainly beyond any probabilistic approach.

For Alice, the paradox is a logical limit, while the absurd is a failure of it. Alice cannot predict, think or speak the absurd, but she can only observe it in the world of adults she tries to survive. It reveals itself as denial of any rational or logical or intuitive structure. The absurd has its own being and it is never expressed by an act of intermediation. In this respect, between Alice and the absurd there is no other absurd category, no interpreter or mediator element. The presence of the absurd when it is shown to Alice is a total one, as well as linear, without fillers or minuses, without possibility of interpretation one.

WORKS CITED

Ackerman, Sherry, Behind the Looking Glass, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

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