"Curiouser and curiouser!" was Alice's verdict on her adventures down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (1865), a book that exposed the absurdity of adult conventions and manners above ground. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson)...
[more]"Curiouser and curiouser!" was Alice's verdict on her adventures down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" (1865), a book that exposed the absurdity of adult conventions and manners above ground. Carroll (whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson) was a pathologically shy mathematics tutor at Oxford and a typically repressed product of Victorian England. He accepted the life of celibacy then required of Oxford fellows, already accustomed to seclusion from society -- his childhood was spent in the family rectory; during a later stint at Rugby he was ruthlessly bullied and developed a life-long stutter. Like many Victorians, Carroll found refuge in the free and playful realm of childhood, where emotion was not yet stifled. His favorite companions were children, and he loved to take photographs of little girls in natural, whimsical poses. In fact, the adventures of Alice were written for the real-life Alice Liddell, daughter of the dean of his college and object of fascination for the isolated math tutor.
By unleashing the imagination and questioning time, space, identity, and social norms, "Alice in Wonderland" provided key ingredients for later literary forms, including science fiction, fantasy, and hallucinatory rock lyrics. After downing the contents of a bottle labeled "Drink Me," Alice shrinks to Lilliputian size in the first of a series of physical changes that confuse her sense of identity. She then enters a strange garden where she encounters a collection of animal and human characters, all eccentrics who take offense at the oddest things and challenge her ability to "keep her temper." At the Mad Hatter's tea-party, where it's always tea-time, Alice's earnestness is defeated by the riddling, circular use of language -- can she have "more" tea, when she hasn't had any yet at all? The referentiality of language breaks down in Carroll's fantastical work. Not only does he twist the intentions behind "normal" statements, he invents his own words to describe things purely imaginary, as in his poem "Jabberwocky":
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;/All mimsy were the borogroves,/And the mome raths outgabe."
Invited to an audience with Queen Victoria in recognition of his books' beloved status with children, Carroll presented Her Majesty with his treatise on Euclid. Clearly, the imaginary realm of childhood lay not too distant from the pure domain of geometry and math in his head -- his fantasy writing always retains an underlying grammar of logic, however absurd the content.
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