Here are some key quotes I've revisited from a text I found in the early stages of this research:From very early on in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Victorian sense of living a double life is readily apparent. Also riddled throughout the book are Alice’s very proper Victorian ideas of how things should and should not be, most of them having to do with respectability and order.
Victorian society consisted of many, many rules. Children were usually given these rules, or warnings, in cautionary tales where some child does something they should not and ends up hurt, dead, or in hell. Alice obviously had been exposed to these tales. At only seven, they are a forefront in her mind when she ends up in a situation where the rules are not explicitly set out.
Alice has not been raised to live in an ambiguous world. Her world, England’s Victorian world, is highly structured. Partially because of this over structuring of Victorian society, the feeling of living a double life or of being two people was not abnormal. This idea of an underworld or separate underground society is not uncommon in Victorian literature.
Not only has Alice fallen, but she longs to be released into a garden. The religious imagery between the fall from innocence into sin and the wish to return to paradise is not perfect, of course. For even in the garden, Alice finds life less than perfect. “Neither the elusive garden in Wonderland… however, offers more than a temporary oasis in a mutable, biological, and mortal wasteland”
Alice’s descent into Wonderland and subsequent adventures can be seen in the religious light of the overly-morality obsessed Victorians. Carroll even pokes fun at the Victorian obsession with morality in Alice’s garden conversation with the Duchess. “`How fond she is of finding morals in things!' Alice thought to herself”
The Victorians were fond of finding morals in things. And their morals often included the view that what you saw was what you got. “…Maybe it's always pepper that makes people hot-tempered,' she went on, very much pleased at having found out a new kind of rule, `and vinegar that makes them sour--and camomile that makes them bitter--and--and barley-sugar and such things that make children sweet-tempered”
Victorians believed that a book really could be judged by its cover. Short, ugly, or malformed people were cruel and corrupt and violent while tall, beautiful, and perfectly formed people were smart and kind and good. However, the overly restricted society, as stated above, led to an interesting phenomenon. Like many societies where all things considered immoral are publicly scorned and being involved in an immoral act could ruin your reputation, an underworld evolved in which so-called respectable people could lose themselves in non-respectable activities and yet keep their reputation intact, so long as they were not too open about their activities. In the underworld of the Victorians gambling, drug use, prostitution, and other immoral activities were rampant. And many of those are shown in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
While it would seem that insanity is not something that can be held to merely one time period, there are other factors that link the insanity of Wonderland to the Victorian period. For instance, the Mad Hatter. It was in the Victorian period that the Industrial Revolution hit England so hard. One aspect of this was in the factories and haberdashers used mercury on pelts and felt that they used to make their hats. Overexposure to mercury caused serious mental problems in long term haberdashers.
There are a few takes on how to look at Alice’s character. Does she represent Imperialism? This was the time of the British Empire after all. Alice falls into Wonderland, uses its resources and is highly judgmental of the natives. She, at only seven, sets herself far above them and considers them insane and disreputable. And the prejudice Alice is exhibiting was not just Britain’s distain and racism towards countries that they conquered and colonized. “…Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland relates directly to Herbert Spencer's argument that "the intellectual traits of the uncivilized. . . are the traits recurring in the children of the civilized."
Alice is an example of the Victorian child lost in the underbelly of Victorian society. She is confused, often frustrated, and while she is still interested in what is going on around her, the longer she is in Wonderland the less she understands or wishes to be there. Because of the lack of structure and sense, Alice is drifting through Wonderland in confusion. She tries to bring order to a disordered world, tries to make sense of the nonsensical.
Yet another Victorian lesson, all things and all people have their roles and status and it is up to the upper class, the superior people, to keep these roles clear. Once Alice realizes that she is in control she has her way out of Wonderland. By realizing that the guards and soldiers that are set upon her are merely a deck of cards, Alice topples the structure of Wonderland, adds common sense, and awakens to find it has been merely a dream.
Alice is alive, well, and able to grow into a young woman. Wonderland is merely a dream. And the Victorian ways of life are once again hidden safely in the sane boredom of a summer’s day.
