Wonderland
...mation that she remembers from her lessons is usually wrong or completely useless. She babbles to characters she comes to meet and usually leaves them rather confused. All of Alice’s knowledge seems to consist mainly of maxims and morals about obedience and safety, which Carroll considers very limited. In the book, Carroll also inserts many verses that were parodies of former verses for children. He rewrites them in pure nonsense having no moral or meaning other than pure amusement. This rejection of typical Victorian manners and education of children supports one of the themes of the book - the idea that a child’s imagination has much value and no limits. For example, when Alice meets the mouse at the beginning of the story, he wants to tell her a tale. However, she interprets it to mean “tail,” and ends up looking at the poor storytellers “tail” rather than listening to his “tale.” When it comes time for the short rhyme to begin, the words form none other than a tail. Another view Carroll shows through the eyes of Alice is this thoughts on prejudice. In a scene from Alice in Wonderland, the cook is violently hurling saucepans, plates, dishes and whatever else she can get her hands on at the Duchess and the baby. At this, the Duchess states, “If everyone minded their own business, the world would go round a great deal faster than it does” (60). Alice, thinking this as a great opportunity to show off her knowledge, starts to discuss the Earth’s rotation on its axis. Quick to respond, the Duchess shouts about extremities such as chopping off Alice’s head. By reading this passage, the reader can see how Carroll shows that adults can be cruel, childlike, irresponsible, impulsive, and self-indulgent - attributes the Victorians showed towards the African Americans and the lower classes. Carroll manipulates these prejudices and shows how these characteristics also apply to authority figures and even royalty. Not to say that all adults are cruel, but in a child’s mind it sometimes seems that way. A child views anything that is against his wishes as terrible, and when an adult fails to grant his or her wishes, they are not on the child’s good terms list. Although Carroll invented Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the entertainment of children, many scholars have discovered various underlying influences in his work. The books have been explained from all kinds of viewpoints, like drug use, mathematics, political satire, nonsense, and more. They have also been a favorite subject for analysis, as the story lends itself to various interpretations. For example, when Lewis Carroll dreamed up the world of Alice in Wonderland, he gave readers one of the most familiar works inviting Victorian society to escape from its troubles. Yet in contrast to his use of the story as a diversion from these problems, Carroll also created Alice and her imagined world as a chance to comment and reflect upon them. In both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, he mixed great wit and appropriate gravity to explore starvation and malnutrition, paralleling his own society's effort to survive. For example, Alice continuously lookes towards eating to alter her size in this fantasy world. Carroll demonstrated an understandable preoccupation with food in Wonderland as a way of sharing his thoughts on hunger in Victorian society. The scant supply of food dea...