{"id":2283,"date":"2025-04-01T03:36:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T03:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2283"},"modified":"2025-04-01T03:37:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T03:37:14","slug":"is-there-such-a-thing-as-childhood-or-adulthood-in-wonderland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/04\/01\/is-there-such-a-thing-as-childhood-or-adulthood-in-wonderland\/","title":{"rendered":"Is There Such A Thing As Childhood Or Adulthood In Wonderland?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is pretty much the point of Alice in Wonderland that Wonderland itself is a strange place with strange beings and strange rules. But what does that make Alice? Is she a regular human child as we see her, or is that only because of the perspective readers hold based on her introduction?<\/span><\/p>\n

Readers are first introduced to our protagonist, Alice, in the \u201creal world,\u201d after all. Her real-world is something that is familiar to us: she is a child who is still in the process of undergoing education, who goes on walks, and has an older sister. Alice also thinks of herself in this way, by the rules of the real-world, consistently referring to herself as a \u201clittle girl.\u201d The consistent establishment of Alice as a young girl, a child, are important in dictating how readers might treat her, or how they might react to Wonderland. A large part of why is that childhood carries a number of close associations, a notable one being innocence: the idea that children are purely innocent beings began to become quite popular among the Victorians, to the point where Lewis Carroll himself was fascinated by it. In fact, modern readers are still affected by this social idea that children are impressionable and innocent. Readers of Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland are sure to draw upon not only the association of childhood with imagination, but of childhood with innocence, characterizing Alice as an innocent. There are many parts of the book in which Alice demonstrates that trait of innocence. For instance, she often steps back to think about her beloved cat, Dinah, who she misses during her time in Wonderland. \u201c \u2018I hope they\u2019ll remember her saucer of milk at tea-time\u2019 \u201c, she reminisces as she falls down the rabbit-hole, concerned not for her own falling, but her cat (4). She even mentions Dinah to the company of birds and mice she stumbles upon, not thinking ahead to realize that this particular set of creatures might not want to hear about her cat, who might hunt them. When asked about her, Alice replies \u201ceagerly, for she was always ready to talk about her pet\u201d (22). This eagerness and purehearted love for Dinah is a prime example of Alice demonstrating a trait of innocence, where her care for her pet might end up overshadowing her logic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another fascination of the Victorians was with double-ness, manifesting in lookalikes or the duality of one mind (think, for example, of Jekyll and Hyde). My classmates actually have pointed out that some of this double-ness exists within Alice, naming one part of her her \u201cchild self,\u201d and the other, her \u201cadult self.\u201d Her \u201cchild self\u201d is curious and emotional, connected to that trait of innocence I outlined above. Her \u201cchild self\u201d often cries when afraid or hurt: for instance, when she bumps her head against the roof of the rabbit-hole hall, she lays on her side and is brought to tears (9). However, my classmates have also noticed that Alice demonstrates some awareness of how adults might react to her childlike actions, and reminds herself of it in times where she breaks down. Upon crying, she lectures herself: \u201c \u2018You ought to be ashamed of yourself,\u2019 said Alice, \u2018a great girl like you,\u2019 (she might as well say this), \u2018to go on crying in this way! \u2018\u201c (9). Interestingly, Alice at this time is a lot taller than she typically would be in the real-world after magically growing in size, hence why she calls herself a \u201cgreat girl\u201d instead of a \u201clittle girl.\u201d She attempts to correlate her height with adulthood and maturity in order to get her \u201cchild self\u201d to stop crying.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These two aspects of Alice, her innocence and her double-ness, have led me to consider why the characters in Wonderland might react the way they do to her. One of the strangest traits of Wonderland, I\u2019ve concluded, is that it has very little concept of adulthood or childhood, save for rare cases. There are a few characters, such as the baby that becomes a pig, who are determined solely by their age, but most others are ambiguous, assumed to be adults. Even so, the baby that becomes a pig is not treated with the assumed innocence of the child, and is beaten consistently for the misconception that he is purposefully disruptive. If Wonderland does have a consistent concept of maturity, it doesn\u2019t apply presumed innocence of mind to children like the real-world might. This lack of difference in treatment applies to Alice, as well. Characters are often quite harsh to her, and make no effort to understand her, such as in the case of the caterpillar, who continuously interrogates her while she attempts to explain herself to the best of her ability. Still, the caterpillar denies her every word, always replying \u201ccontemptuously\u201d (14). Readers such as myself might find this odd, considering we have the context that Alice is only a young girl in a stressful situation. We may even cite her trait of innocence as evidence of why she should be afforded pity or understanding. The characters in Wonderland, however, don\u2019t seem to think this way about children, much like the caterpillar.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another reason why Alice may be treated strangely in Wonderland, however, is her double-ness that I described earlier. Her \u201cadult self\u201d does not only appear when she scolds herself for crying, for instance. It also appears in scenes like the one with the baby pig, who she temporarily takes from its parent in order to save it from further beating, thus parentifying herself instead (47). Could it be that because of this duality, characters treat her as if she were an adult, or they ignore that she is a child? In fact, could this duality be a sort of \u201cmadness\u201d? In a scene where the Cheshire Cat appears in a tree, he states that Alice \u201cmust be\u201d mad, or she \u201cwouldn\u2019t have come here\u201d (50). The cat might be referring to the fact that her \u201cmadness\u201d is actually her childish curiosity, the very innocence spoken of earlier that led to her jumping down a deep and dangerous rabbit-hole. Or, possibly, the cat might be referring to something more complicated, such as this complication of character that Alice also possesses. Either way, Alice\u2019s childhood as well as her complexity blatantly affect her navigation of Wonderland. <\/span><\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/p>\n

Carroll, Lewis.\u00a0Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass.\u00a0<\/em>Bantam Books, 2006.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is pretty much the point of Alice in Wonderland that Wonderland itself is a strange place with strange beings and strange rules. But what does that make Alice? Is she a regular human child as we see her, or is that only because of the perspective readers hold based on her introduction? Readers are … Continue reading Is There Such A Thing As Childhood Or Adulthood In Wonderland?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5136"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2283\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}