Through The Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll - Fantasy

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is an extension to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with Alice being a little bit older and the time period set in the winter months instead of the spring. Through age has touched Alice, she still is the same little girl yearning to explore into places that she has never been before. Alice enters into a new world where everything is backwards, because she walked into it from a mirror or looking glass. Outside she finds the same realistic setting as the reader experienced in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but soon is introduced to fantastic and extraordinary characters. The flowers talk about soil softness and hardness and Alice is instantly entered into a game of chess, in which her very movement is a play on an enormous chess board that spans the country of “Look Glass”. I was reminded of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with Mr. Tumus telling Lucy that she was from the world or “Spare-om”. Just as Lucy entered Narnia through a door in a wardrobe, Alice entered into the world of Looking Glass through a looking glass, or mirror. C. S. Lewis places his main characters in dangerous situations constantly throughout his novel, yet Lewis Carroll only allows his Alice to be in safe, yet absurd, settings.

To the analytical reader, Carroll leaves little tid bits of information here and there through the novel. He allows Alice to see the sad hilarity of war in the battle between the Lion and the Unicorn. Here the reader sees two creatures “chivalrously” fighting each other. They battle a little and then decide to stop for tea and sandwiches while picnicing beside one another. They even share a plum-cake together. Then, they pick up the battle and begin fighting again. The creatures are fighting for a kingship which already belongs to another king. Oh how we humans in this century and in the centuries past could learn from this. War is a sad hilarity. I was posed the question by a young person several weeks ago of how it is we can get together to discuss the “ethics” of war between warring nations, but we can not get together to cause war to cease. Are we nations around the world still entertaining the sad hilarity of war by acting out as the Lion and the Unicorn?

Carroll’s portrayal of the queens (both Red and White) showed ironic humor, as well. Both queens seem to be more interested in keeping with traditions and being seen as “well brought up” than actually doing anything with their lives. They in fact fall asleep in Alice’s lap, thinking only of curling their hair, going to a feast, and then going to a ball. I do wonder if Lewis’ disenfranchised feeling about the Red Queen and the White Queen could have come from a similar feeling about England’s monarchy at the time.

How hilarious and infuriating Humpty Dumpty is in this book. I always felt sorry for him in my Mother Goose books growing up, but in Looking Glass land he is anything but delightful to be around. He shows signs of bigotry and racism that may have been prevalent in English society of that day (and unfortunately is still present in some forms today). He is absolutely ridiculous; spouting off about how if he falls the king and all his men will save him and how incredibly handsome he is! He seems to not realize that he is just an egg and no matter how many men will come after his fall, once broken, always broken. I have met some people as egotistical as Humpty Dumpty.

Through the Looking Glass seems to have a more lessons to learn in it than Lewis’ other fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Wonderland was fun and delightful, while Looking Glass land was more mysterious and not so funny. It is almost as if Alice is growing up and loosing her sense of fantasy and imagination that little girls have and moving on into more adult-like situations, with a little extraordinary added to them. I prefer Wonderland with its silly adventures than land of Looking Glass to its lesson learning events.