Alice's Wonderland: Performances of Identity

Victorian & Edwardian Studies

Volume 9

Edited by

Francesco Marroni

“G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara

Editorial Board

Richard Ambrosini (University of Rome III)

Ian Campbell (University of Edinburgh)

Allan C. Christensen (John Cabot University, Rome)

Natalie B. Cole (Oakland University)

Elio Di Piazza (University of Palermo)

Roger Ebbatson (University of Lancaster)

Rama Kundu (Burdwan University, India)

Maureen Moran (Brunel University, London)

David Paroissien (University of Buckingham)

Catherine L. Phillips (Downing College, Cambridge)

David Skilton (Cardiff University)

Contents

1. INTRODUCTION

2. PART 1 A Performance of Narrative Frames and Stories

   1. CHAPTER 1 Alice and Wonder

   2. CHAPTER 2 Food in Wonderland

   3. CHAPTER 3 Alice in Wonderlaw

3. PART 2 Adaptations

   1. CHAPTER 4 Coraline. A Postmodern Alice

   2. CHAPTER 5 Then She Fell: Alice and Immersive Wonderland

4. PART 3 Literature and Dance: Imagination, Intermediality and the Body

   1. CHAPTER 6 Alice into Dance Wonderland

5. CONCLUSION

6. REFERENCES

7. INDEX

Introduction

Edward Lear’s limerick, widely recognised as one of the clearest expressions of his rebellious spirit and resistance to categorisation¹, may equally apply to Lewis Carroll. Carroll, like Lear, can be seen as a man dwelling on cultural borders: an observer and commentator of his own time, while also anticipating the concerns and sensibilities of future generations. Yet Carroll arguably pushes further, offering his contemporaries and posterity not only a critique of Victorian norms but also a narrative framework through which to explore questions of identity, knowledge, and cultural structures.

Remarkably, Lear’s nonsense verse appears to foreshadow the essential elements and deeper significance of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. From the idea of crossing a border into a fantastical, symbolic realm, to the presence of a cat and a hatter—key figures in Wonderland—Lear’s limerick encapsulates the disorientation and playful subversion that characterise Carroll’s text. The sense of vexation, present both in Lear’s nonsensical world and in Alice’s encounters, echoes throughout Wonderland, embodied in figures like the Queen of Hearts and in the narrative’s defiance of conventional logic. Carroll operates at the threshold of genres—children’s literature, fantasy, satire, and philosophical allegory—constructing an original synthesis that transcends its Victorian context and attains a truly metafictional status.

Carroll creatively reworks elements from Victorian cautionary tales, fairy tales, and the fantastic, simultaneously engaging and frustrating readers’ expectations. In doing so, he invites active reader participation, only to ultimately deny the comfort of closure. Wonderland remains fundamentally unchanged by Alice’s passage through it; she does not conquer, solve, or transform the realm, nor does she retrieve an object or complete a quest. Her departure—perhaps prompted by a final ironic submission to Rule 42—does not end Wonderland but merely displaces her from it. The realm continues, unaltered, as a potential of the imagination. What Alice brings back is not a moral lesson, but a narrative potential: a capacity to tell stories, to engage with the world through language, imagination, and critical reflection. As a matter of fact, her sister foresees: “How she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago” (AW 97). This, in the truest sense, is the real “Wonder-land”—not a place of definitive answers, but one of creative engagement and endless storytelling.

Carroll was acutely aware of the layered and polysemic nature of literary works. He once observed:

[…] words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So whatever good meanings are in the book, I’m glad to accept as the meaning of the book².

Here, Carroll implicitly renounces the rigid authorial control characteristic of much Victorian moral fiction and redirects authority toward the reader. In a move that anticipates reader-response theory, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ends not with a conclusive moral but with a metafictional gesture: the story shifts to Alice’s sister, and by emulation, to all future readers, each invited to imagine and reinterpret Wonderland in their own terms. Carroll’s tale becomes an origin point for future narratives—a symbolic affirmation of humanity’s deepest impulse: the urge to tell stories as a way of grappling with identity, meaning, and the contingencies of experience³.

Indeed, Carroll himself returned to Wonderland in Through the Looking-Glass, revisiting not only a fictional landscape but his own evolving worldview, the passage of time, and the character he created. From the moment of its publication, Alice generated after-narratives— adaptations, rewritings, reimaginings—that transformed it into a dynamic cultural artifact. Over time, its imagery, language, and characters have permeated the fabric of everyday life. Carrollian expressions like “portmanteau words” and metaphors such as “falling down the rabbit hole” have entered common parlance. Alice herself has transcended her literary origins to become a cultural myth—a symbol rooted in collective memory, mutable across media and contexts.

As a myth, Alice is not merely a static icon but a symbolic structure through which individuals and societies negotiate relationships to the self, to others, and to institutional and cultural forces. Myths, as scholars have noted, form the foundations of culture through constitutive narratives⁴. Yet myths also expose existential tensions. They embody humanity’s quest to impose meaning upon a world that often resists codification⁵. As Graham Swift reminds us, humans are “the animals who crave meaning”, and more than anything, “the animals who ask why”⁶. In this sense, Alice’s journey is a metafictional exploration of how and why we ask—an interrogation of language, knowledge, and the self.

We may argue, then, that Alice has achieved the status of an archetype—residing in the collective unconscious and metafictionally informing the symbolic structures of multiple periods. She becomes not only a figure in a narrative, but a model for narrative: an open, self-aware system through which cultural and individual identities are imagined, performed, and revised.