Psychoanalytic Approaches Toward Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There'

Park, Hanson; Lim, Weon Jeong

Abstract

Lewis Carroll's 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There' are classics of stories for children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre. Until now, most of psychoanalytic approaches is focused either on the writer's life or on psychodynamic interpretation about real life of the writer, Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson. Even though it would be possible for him to have pedophilic natures, his work might be so valuable to be interpreted as an independent achievement. In these stories, we can find the several motifs for evolution of the nature and progress of one human, which includes phase of autogenesis, oral aggression, self-consciousness and phallic symbolization. These tales tell us the anxiety about changes of the Victorian age by Alice's wandering in the strange place. But he tried to seek new orders through the dream and fantasy of Alice, where she was standing bewildered among basic fears and oral cruelties of peculiar animals. It is certain for these great fairy tales to have the independent value to be analyzed psycho-dynamically.