{"id":2517,"date":"2025-05-05T22:15:36","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T22:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2517"},"modified":"2025-05-05T22:15:36","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T22:15:36","slug":"growing-upwards-in-alices-adventures-in-wonderland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/05\/05\/growing-upwards-in-alices-adventures-in-wonderland\/","title":{"rendered":"Growing Up(wards) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland<\/em> explores the dream-world experiences of seven-year-old Alice, where she is constantly pulled around into different hectic situations and physically changed in order to match each one of them. In the first two chapters alone, she shrinks and grows and shrinks again. Alice\u2019s physical body goes through so many disorienting changes, and throughout them, her young mind can\u2019t seem to keep up. Once she grows large, she begins to cry out of frustration before scolding herself, saying \u201cYou ought to be ashamed of yourself, a great girl like you to go on crying in this way!\u201d (Carroll 9). This way of speaking to herself shows the confusion Alice is experiencing, because she\u2019s both upset at the circumstances and yelling at herself for being upset. She cannot keep up with what\u2019s been happening, thus dividing herself into functionally two beings: the more mature, responsible, \u201cbig\u201d Alice, and the emotional, immature, \u201csmall\u201d Alice.<\/p>\n

This idea of her identity as tied to her physical form continues with her growing and shrinking. When she meets the caterpillar, he asks her who she is, to which she replies, \u201cI hardly know, Sir, just at present\u2013\u2013at least I know who I was<\/em> when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then\u201d (34). Even though nothing has actually changed Alice\u2019s mind, she finds herself unable to believe that she is still the same Alice because of the changes in her physical size that she has experienced in Wonderland. Her body as her identity is also reinforced with her interaction with the pigeon, who tells her that because of her long neck, a consequence of eating the size-changing mushroom, she cannot be a little girl any longer. Rather, he decides that she must be a serpent (40). This is upsetting to Alice, because now she is not just unsure of her identity but is being adamantly told that she cannot be herself. By literally, physically growing up in size, Alice is becoming a different person, someone who she does not recognize, nor do those around her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lewis Carroll\u2019s Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland explores the dream-world experiences of seven-year-old Alice, where she is constantly pulled around into different hectic situations and physically changed in order to match each one of them. In the first two chapters alone, she shrinks and grows and shrinks again. Alice\u2019s physical body goes through so many disorienting … Continue reading Growing Up(wards) in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5598,"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-2517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517","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\/5598"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}