Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass Themes
Exploration
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass record the adventures and exploits of one little girl through a variety of strange fantasylands. Exploration in these books is a playf...
Identity
Identity in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is constantly shifting. Its instability creates anxiety and confusion, but also enables another kind of exploration. We mu...
Language and Communication
In the Alice books, language continually fails to provide an adequate means of communication. In fact, the complex and confusing nature of language frequently leads to miscommunication. Often this...
Youth
The Alice books celebrate youth as a time when the individual is open to imaginative possibilities. Childhood is praised, not exactly as a period of innocence, but as a state in which many things a...
Education
The Alice books both embrace and mock book learning. Frequently, the things children learn in the schoolroom are parodied as impractical or inapplicable to real life. Alice absorbs rote lessons but...
Philosophical Viewpoints: The Absurd
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are often thought of as "philosophical" fantasies. In fact, these books offer no specific coherent philosophy of life. They do, howeve...
Violence
The violent moments in the Alice books stand in sharp contrast to the more lighthearted moments of fantasy. Many jokes are morbid or focus on the possibility of death. Conflict, battle, and even wa...
Contrasting Regions
Throughout Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, it is only possible to understand the strangeness and curiousness of the fantasy world by comparing it to the "real world"...
Madness
Madness is the explanation for just about any silly, curious, or crazy behavior in theAlice books. The reader must give in and accept a certain degree of irrationality in order to enjoy the tales....
Freedom and Confinement
Confinement in the Alice books is almost always literal and physical (for instance, when Alice gets stuck in the White Rabbit's house). Freedom is gained by ingenuity and imagination, which create...