Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Coursework Notes

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NOTES FOR ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND- THE COMING OF AGE AND LOSS OF INNOCENCE IN CHILDHOOD To what extent do aaiw and lw portray the loss of innocence in childhood and the coming of age The Child-Swain Alice is the most responsible "character" in the story; in fact, she is the only real person and the only "true" character. At most, the other creatures are antagonists, either a bit genial or cruel, depending on how they treat Alice at any given point in the story. Alice's innocence makes her a perfect vehicle of social criticism. In her encounters, we see the charmingly pathetic ingénue — a child whose only purpose is to escape the afflictions around her. By implication, there is the view that a child's perception of the world is the only sane one. Conversely, to grow and mature leads to inevitable corruption, to sexuality, emotionalism, and adult hypocrisy. The child as an innocent, sympathetic object has obvious satirical utility, but only to the point that the child must extend sympathy herself — and Alice fails to do this when she describes her cat Dinah to the Mouse, and later when she confesses to having eaten eggs to the frightened mother pigeon. Alice's initial reaction after falling down the rabbit-hole is one of extreme loneliness- similar to a child’s mind in the modern world. Her curiosity has led her into a kind of Never-Never Land, over the edge of Reality and into a lonely, very alien world. She is further lost when she cannot establish her identity. Physically, she is lost; psychologically, she also feels lost. She cannot get her recitations right, and she becomes even more confused when her arithmetic (a subject she believed to be unchanging and solid) fails her. Every attempt to establish a familiar basis of identity creates only the sense of being lost — absolutely lost. Alice becomes, to the reader, a mistreated, misunderstood, wandering
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