Exploring Conflicting Meanings of the Child in Lewis Carroll’s Victorian classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Type :

Term papers

Pages :

4 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

04/25/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction
Carroll's hypnotic dreamscape
Wollstonecraft: An early women's rights advocate
Alice's dreams and nightmares in Wonderland
Conclusion
Bibliography

Abstract

The construction of childhood in victorian England helps lend a context to the meaning(s) of lewis carroll's children's classic, alice's adventures in wonderland. This short paper will examine the emergence of 'childhood' as a new category, beginning in the late 18th century, expanded and expounded upon by scholars and practical social planners, from that time period onward. (Hendrick, 1990) Hailed as a work of enduring imagination, read by both children and adults, carroll's work is described and understood as Knoepflmacher writes, as an example of the balance between childhood as a time of 'magical thinking' and the author and adult readers' regression to their own childhood, as a way of referencing what was regarded as a lost time. (Knoepflmacher, 1983) The victorian era struggled with two visions of the child - the older idea of the sinful child and the newer idea of 'childhood' as a natural stage in life, and a means of organizing a compulsory childhood, via the mechanism of the compulsory education system. (Hendrick, 1990 ). This paper will argue that carroll's writing contains elements of all of these possibilities: child/adult imagination; references to cultural ideas of devil children and angelic, middle class educated idealized child, and thirdly, what Kincaid calls the author's use of children's literature as a means to explore the imagination (Kincaid, 1973). The intersection and presence of all of these ideas reveal carroll's own experimentation with childhood and its various possible meanings through his work as a creative artist.