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... uspicious of his motives for associating with her children (DLB v. 163 61). Despite her feelings, Carroll was still permitted to escort the girls on day trips, which they enjoyed (62). During the afternoon of July 4, 1862, the story, which would become known as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, was told for the first time (63). Carroll created this fascinating story to entertain the Liddell girls, Login, Alice, and Edith throughout a boat ride on the river Isis.
From all three girls came the plead, Tell us a story and from there is history. After the boat ride, he met with Liddell's daughters for walks and croquet and heard them sign Beautiful Star, which entered the book as the Mock Turtles song on Beautiful Soup. Alice enjoyed the story Carroll created so much that she coerced him to record the tale on paper. And so Carroll began to write.
By February 10, 1963, the manuscript had been finished with the title of Alice's Adventures Underground, and he sent it to his friend and fellow write of childrens fantasies, George MacDonald. MacDonald and his children had read the story and all of them loved the tale so they persuaded Carroll to publish his work. While the illustrations for the novel were being sketched, Carroll changed the title to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (DLB v. 18 48). The basic plot of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland involves Alice's desire to enter a wonderful garden that she sees after having wandered down a rabbits hole. Alice eventually obtains her goal and enters the garden. During the course of her travels through Wonderland she meets a strange combination of people and human like animals.
The first character she meets is the White Rabbit. The Rabbit is the through line of the novel. That is, he is the character that Alice follows, and he reappears to get things moving again. In a way, he is a sort of guide, though he is too worried about himself to really be guiding anyone. The White Rabbit may be a parallel to Carroll himself because Carroll may think of himself as a guide to Alice Liddell as he takes her on special outings and bonds with her.
Also, the Rabbit loses his gloves in the first chapter and it has been noted that Carroll was obsessed with carrying gloves with him while outdoors. The most obvious parallel between Carroll's life and his writing of Alice is the cherished relationship between him and Alice Liddell. She was the inspiration for his writing and for the sequel to the novel, Through the Looking Glass. A closer analysis of the character of Alice in the novel is her fluctuating sense of self.
This is introduced in the first chapter when she is decided whether to drink the bottle which makes her small or eat the cake, which makes her big. Alice, meant to be a girl of about eleven or so, is on the cusp of adolescence. But what does she want to be? If she shrinks to a child-like size to get through the doorway into what seems to be the garden of childhood, then she is too small to reach the key to open that door. She is trapped in a kind of paradox. Throughout the chapter Alice is "trying on" her adult self.
She speaks in a learned manner, even when she isn't quite sure what she is speaking about, and she often creates in her own mind an adult personality to check her childish impulses. This split personality may be a parallel to Lewis Carroll again. In his life he had two selves: Charles Dodgson; being a proper and serious Victorian gentleman and then Lewis Carroll; a character of more humor and mystifying nature where he related best with children. Alice's identity crisis in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland reoccurs many times throughout the novel and is one of the main themes that are portrayed.
Certain aspects of religion come into play throughout this young girl's journey, a journey symbolic of universal growth and self-discovery. As Alice learns a great deal about herself with each new encounter in Wonderland, she begins to realize that these experiences weaken and even distort her previously stable self-image. The caterpillar is one character who cannot accept Alice's lack of self-awareness, or at least what he considers self-awareness to indicate. When he asks Alice Who are you? , she is unable to respond with a clear answer.
Alice is struggling to find herself, which is an import part of religious life, connecting with your inner self. Carroll was influenced heavily by his fathers teachings of religious faith and Carroll incorporates the importance of it into the novel. One last parallel between Carroll's life and the novel is the use of many puzzles, mathematics, games, and riddles throughout Alice's experiences in Wonderland. Like Carroll, trying to work out mathematical puzzles when he was falling asleep, Alice attempts to calculate how many miles she has fallen down the rabbits hole into Wonderland. At the Mad Hatters tea party, there are many riddles, to which there are no answers, but his unique humor is exposed. While in the Queens garden, Alice plays a game of croquet with her.
Carroll and Alice Liddell would often play croquet together during the time they spent with each other. The novel is filled with play on words and different anagrams such as the way Carroll came up with his pen name. In conclusion, the novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland written by Lewis Carroll was greatly influenced by Carroll's life experiences and unique character. His biggest stimulus in his life was Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the novel and reason it was recorded, which is accompanied by many other smaller influences such as his family, personal qualities, and education. In the words of the critic Derek Hudson: The most remarkable think about Alice is that, though it springs from the very heart of the Victorian period, it is timeless in its appeal. This is a characteristic that it shares with other classics-a small band- that have similarly conquered the world (Leach 5).
Bibliography: WORKS CITED Blake, Kathleen. Lewis Carroll. Victorian Novelists After 1885. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983.
Vol. 18 of Dictionary Literary Biography. Green, Roger Lancelyn. The Story of Lewis Carroll. New York: Henry Schuman, 1951.
Kelly, Richard. Lewis Carroll. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. Leach, Karoline. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll): A Brief Biography. Online. 26 Apr. 2000.
Available: www. web Pudney, John. Lewis Carroll and his World. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976.
Smith, Karen Patricia. Lewis Carroll. British Childrens Writers, 1800 - 1880. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1983. Vol. 163 of Dictionary of Literary Biography.
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