Preview

Coming Of Age In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, By Lewis Carroll

Better Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1101 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Coming Of Age In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, By Lewis Carroll
On the surface, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, appears to be a fantasy novel about an adolescent girl’s psychedelic dream. However, on a deeper level, the story symbolizes the process that every child goes through as he or she matures into adulthood. Alice’s journey through Wonderland, although it puts her life in danger at times, brings her a newly-discovered confidence and helps to solidify her identity into a more mature person and therefore escape from the fantasy dream-world; this progression illustrates one of the main themes of the book: the inevitable loss of innocence that every child goes through and the maturity that comes with this process of personal growth and coming of age.
Alice goes through physical changes
…show more content…
In real life, all kids grow up, and no one can control his or her own size, but what we can control are our actions and behavior so that we make good choices. Based on information from the American Psychological Association, we can understand that Alice is going through changes in cognitive development that occur during adolescence:
“Changes in how adolescents think, reason, and understand can be even more dramatic than their obvious physical changes. From the concrete, black-and-white thinkers they appear to be one day, rather suddenly it seems, adolescents become able to think abstractly and in shades of gray. They are now able to analyze situations logically in terms of cause and effect and to entertain hypothetical situations and use symbols, such as in metaphors, imaginatively”
…show more content…
Her experience in Wonderland is a learning experience, just like adolescence should be, to prepare her for adulthood. In the hall of doors, mysterious potions and cakes give her the ability to grow and shrink, but she always misses out on the size she needs to be. When she is at her smallest, she is swept away by the pool of tears and when she finally manages to grow, thanks to the edible pebbles in the White Rabbit’s house, she grows too much and gets

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    So Much to Tell You

    • 1035 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Growth happens in time. Marina came to Warrington, as a gloomy character whose true features are hidden by her phantasmagoria. But as time goes on, and certain happenings occur, some of her phantasmagoria shatters and it allows people to view some of Marina’s…

    • 1035 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    “Effective nonsense keeps one foot on the ground; fantasy needs a realistic background, a frame of familiar reference. A tour of Wonderland without the practical, very English little Alice to serve as norm would be tedious indeed. But the presence of Alice as norm, as the embodiment of Victorian practicality and industry, suggests that the Alice books may have satiric implications. (Matthews 109).…

    • 2116 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lewis Carroll wrote a story about a young girl ‘Alice’ who fell through a rabbit whole into a fantasy world inhabited by strange, humanlike creatures. Alice encounters lots of different humanlike creatures throughout her journey through the world of nonsense, poetry and mind-boggling logic, like, the talking flowers, the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Queen of Hearts, Jabberwocky and the White Queen. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland included shrinking, growing to the size of a giant, attending the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, playing Croquet and attending the Queen of Hearts court.…

    • 438 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Childhood is a strange and wonderful time of ignorance and imagination where the floor can be lava, a sandbox can be a construction zone, and summers are filled with playing in the sun. Among these fun times there is a fundamental formation happening in our brain creating our personalities; peers and parents contribute greatly to this. Writers often introduce a childish character who is shown to change from a hardship they face. In American works such as The Death of a Salesman, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet letter, and The Body children, or childish characters, are introduced to bring light to their ever changing personalities and the forces and events that shaped them.…

    • 1099 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Childhood is a crucial time in everyone’s life, as it affects the decisions they make later on. In fact in some cases, our childhood determines who we are, or whom we’ll become in the future. A child’s childhood must be kept innocent and pure for the well being of the their future. The recurring theme in Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals, is the loss of innocence at a young age, led by the choices and decisions of the characters, and this theme can be connected back to the novel itself, Alden Nowlan’s short story, The Fall of a City, and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.…

    • 1775 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Jasper Jones Essay Model

    • 1351 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The shattering of the child’s perceptions of life, through knowledge of the truth, is what we refer to as the ‘loss of innocence’. To ‘come of age’ is to lose the innocence of childhood and to begin to develop the beliefs, values and attitudes of the adult, that will both shape that adult’s perceptions of life and allow them to function in an adult world. Thus is gaining knowledge of the truth a fundamental aspect of the process of coming of age. Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey is a coming of age novel. It details one summer in the lives of four teenagers, Charlie, Jasper, Jeffrey and Eliza, when they are confronted with the truth behind the secrets, lies and myths of their small hometown, Corrigan. The revelation of these dark truths shapes the lives of all these characters. Charlie is thrust into adulthood, while Eliza’s world is torn apart. Jeffrey develops the strength to overcome racial stereotyping, while for Jasper, the revelation of secrets is both a healing and a liberating force.…

    • 1351 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    At the formal operation stage that happens between the age of 12 and 19 years, the adolescents develop the ability to think about abstract concept contrary to the concrete stage. A number of skills are developed by the individual including inductive reasoning, systematic planning and logical thought. The child is able at this point to combine and classify items in a complex manner and has also the capacity to embrace a high-order type of thinking. At the stage the child is able to make plans and test the hypotheses out (Brown,…

    • 1051 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    she discovers what it meant for her to be attractive growing up. She was constantly…

    • 1081 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Jane

    • 1889 Words
    • 8 Pages

    | Children at this stage tend to be egocentric and struggle to see things from the perspective of others. While they are getting better with language and thinking, they still tend to think about things in very concrete terms.…

    • 1889 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Ap English Speech Essay

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Change and learning are the keys to this imaginative journey with Alice experiencing juxtaposition between childhood and adolescence. Alice’s imaginative journey is seen where she repetitively grows and shrinks in size, metaphorically depicting her change and confusion. Her confusion is furthered through paradox’s such as “I see what I eat is the same as I eat what I see!” Wouldn’t you be confused by that too? The journey imaginatively parallels a dog eat dog world which is the harsh reality Alice must face. By learning this, Alice undergoes change, which is the point of the imaginative…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    • Study of adolescent thinking dominated by Piagetian theory until the 1980s • Accepted by most textbooks but not empirically testable • Search for framework of understanding for 25 years • Conventional models of adolescent thinking do not adequately account for adolescent behaviour…

    • 1423 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    At the young age of 15 Connie isn’t sure if she still wants to be a child or grow into a woman. The narrator states, “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head, her mouth which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out, and her laugh which was cynical and drawling at home – ‘Ha, ha, very funny’ – but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet” explains her inner turmoil of an adolescent growing into a woman (Oates 422). While at home, Connie wanted to still be seen as a child, but outside of her family’s eyes, she sought to be sexually desired and popular. In order to keep these two worlds separate, Connie constantly lies to her mother about her whereabouts and who she is spending time with. Connie and her friends are dropped off at the mall and then wander to a nearby hangout spot…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    References: Coyle, D. D. (2009). Kids Really “Are” Different These Days. Phi Delta Kappan, 90(6), 404-407. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com.jvlapps.nsuok.edu…

    • 1458 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alice in wonderland is an adventurous book full of mystery, conflicts, and surprisingly allegory. Alice goes through trails, revelations, and at one point even gets accused of “being the wrong Alice.” In this story, Alice believes that she is dreaming and having a weird one at that, but in reality she is not really dreaming. Alice is really trying to find herself and with that she is portraying the conflicts in her life through the world of wonderland. To me wonderland is just a dimension of realization and a way for Alice to find the answers to the questions that she needs. But will Alice realize this in time or will she go on through her “dream” without any realization at all? In Alice in wonderland there are many cases of allegory. The cases the i will be pointing out and defining in my own words are “The Rabbit Hole”, “Size and Growth”, and “The Looking - Glass.” In this essay i will explain my theories and definitions of the allegory in Alice in Wonderland.…

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Adolescents experience a major shift in thinking from the concrete to the abstract- adults way of thinking, about possibilities, through hypothesis, metacognition, fast legible style of handwriting.…

    • 1675 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics