Analysis of Through The Looking Glass' As Victorian Children Literature With The Help of Felicity A. Hughes

Analysis of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ as Victorian Children Literature with the help of
Felicity A. Hughes
Development of Children literature coincides, more or less with that of novel. Development of a
separate body of literature has been crucially associated with that of the novel, and the critical
fortunes of one have been strongly affected by those of the other. In eighteen eighties novelists
struggled against the constraints imposed on them due to ‘family readership’ of novel. Novel was
engaged in a struggle to live down the stigma of being a ‘low’ form, not art but entertainment owing
to the lack of long and distinguished classical ancestry like poetry or drama. In order to gain critical
respectability novelists redirected their writing towards what was seen as arts’ traditional elite
audience of educate males, protecting it from women and children. Novels got divided into books for
adult men and books for children.
Earlier, due to its family readership novelists were forced to write with a view of helping parent or
guardians to bring up their children in traditional beliefs. Moral and didactic themes were common in
children fiction. Carroll, in his fantastical world of misrule questions these very notions of right and
wrong or good and bad .For example, Alice faces the dilemma of choosing between the carpenter’s
intentions and walrus’ actions. Similarly, Alice’s own actions vary from being scornful to benevolent.
The questions regarding, who is wrong and who is to be punished remain unanswered through out the
narrative.
The way in which novel is read or perceived has also been a debatable issue. According to James
characters must be ‘objective’ and the reader to be detached whereas R.L Stevenson saw reader
involvement and the submersion of self to be the triumph of art. However, according to Hughes,
children read books in a different way. It is presumed that children can’t have aesthetic pleasures.
Professor F.J Coleman goes on to say, “The lowest pleasures would be those that any sentient human
being can feel-children, idiots, the senile; they are such pleasures that do not require
discrimination.”Classification of children with idiots or senile, shows the extent of undervaluation of
a child’s mental status. It was assumed that the derivation of aesthetic pleasures from ‘serious’ content
of art required a certain amount of emotional maturity which children couldn’t be expected to possess.
However, it seems that this ‘lack of sense’ in children itself allows Carroll to use ‘nonsense’ to
question various Victorian norms and sensibility. Jabberwocky, a seemingly nonsense poem signifies
that for a child the way the adults talk and the norms and conventions of the adult world are almost
absurd. Carroll uses various metaphors to bring out various Victorian issues. He critiques -racism
through biased treatment of flowers by Alice on the basis of their colour, industrialisation and
mechanisation of humans through the imagery of Alice running continuously but remaining in same
place, malnutrition and hunger through a fantastical Bread –and-butter fly which survives on tea,
political tussle by the use of lion and unicorn as metaphors.
Striking feature of English children’s literature is the amount and quality of fantasy offered to children
especially in the last quarter century. Exclusion of children from the readership of the serious novel
was associated with the acceptance of a version of realism. Since, fantasy can be seen as the antithesis
of realism, it became a major component of ‘non-serious’ art or children literature. All these
assumptions are questioned in Carroll’s text. In escaping into the looking-glass world Alice does not
actually escape from the anxieties and problems of the ‘real world’. According to Rosemary Jackson,
“As fantasy recombines and inverts the real it does not escape it, it exists in a parasitical or symbiotic
relationship to the real. The fantastic cannot exist independently of the real world which it seems to
find so frustratingly finite.” In the real world, Alice's life only involved around being “punished” even
though half the times she was only “anxious to be of use.” She is gleeful when realisation dawns on
her that in the Looking-glass world that “there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire...what
fun would it be, when they see me through the glass here, and can't get at me”. Through this
exclamation of Alice, it can be seen that she was trying to avoid confrontation with the adults of her
family, and her child like excitement comes forth in knowing they “can't get at her.”Alice only
thinks whereupon entering the Looking-glass world that she has escaped from the “Victorian
hothouse of rules and conventionalities”. (Fiona Mc Cullough) On her interaction with the “live
flowers” in the garden, she immediately changes the topic when the Rose and the Tiger-lily start
disapproving of her. "The Rose remarks that Alice had “some sense” in her, even though she doesn't
have a very “clever” face. The Tiger-lily remarks that if her petals “curled up” up a bit more, she'd be
“all right”. The Petals perhaps refer to her unkempt hair and the narratorial voice remarks that “Alice
didn't like being criticized”. She is heckled and the flowers undermine her. This is very much like the
real world she is part of. When the daisies all speak her, she threatens to pick them in order to subdue
the pert flowers. Through this episode, Alice almost sounds like a teacher or governess speaking.
Children in the hierarchical order of the Victorian society were beneath their tutors or governesses,
who in spite being paid employees, were regarded with more respect. In fact the metaphor of chess
used throughout the narration symbolises strict rules, hierarchy of Victorian society and the quest to
move upwards.
According to Hughes, during Victorian times it was assumed that tricks of style and dark allusion are
for adult readers where as for child reader’s it is all about grip. However, Carroll found a new way of
writing for children, where the child reader was treated as an equal rather than a subordinate.

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