ENGL 2810Y Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Roger Sale, March Hare
17 Oct 2018
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Department
Course
Professor
Alice in Wonderland
• Uncontrollable changes
• body shape and size change quickly, uncontrollably
• humour, terror, philosophical implications
• for Alice, size is a problem whether big or small
• if too small, vulnerable
• if too big, clumsy or trapped
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• later uses size changes to advantage
• small size for evasion (puppy, 82)
• large size for force (Bill the lizard out chimney, 79) or control (as in ending)
• similar to a real kid’s physical growth
• no control over physical changes
• absurdity = REAL-WORLD anxieties
• Alice grows (and shrinks), but change is physical, not emotional or psychological
• mocking idea of a character’s growth into maturity
• Kelly: “Alice, on the other hand, is neither naughty nor excessively nice, but curious and
bewildered. She may grow physically; but her experiences do not apparently teach her
anything, alter her behaviour, or prepare her for adulthood in a conventional way” (14)
• “Like the great real-life adventurers of her day, Alice is strongly motivated by
curiosity. She resembles a Victorian anthropologist, an explorer encountering strange
cultures that she chooses not to understand” (Kelly 16)
• “it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then” (141)
• “Wonderland is a place of words, fragments, and questions that resist the mind’s
relentless attempt to discover order and meaning. […] Like the big questions in life (Is
there a God? Is there free will?), the riddle is about words, not reality.” (Kelly 113)
• linguistic meanings, puns, double-meanings
• language illogical, full of doubt (counters Victorian sensibility)
• poems Alice recites come out “wrong from beginning to end”
• other characters in Wonderland expect language to be completely consistent and
unambiguous (Rackin, “Alice’s Journey”, 398).
• Wonderland's double standards impossible to meet
• challenge to 19th-century devotion to reason and logic
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• lack of fixed meanings both frustrating and liberating
• bats/cats word play: “for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t
much matter which way she put it” (65)
• purpose/porpoise wordplay (141)
• misunderstanding
• taking words and phrases literally instead of metaphorically
• overlooking or ignoring technical language
