Fantasy, Language, and Power in Lewis Carroll
Introduction
To speak of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland often provokes an ambivalent reaction. For many readers, it remains a children’s book, populated by extravagant scenes, impossible creatures, and situations seemingly devoid of logic. For others, however, there persists a strong intuition that beneath this playful surface something more serious, even unsettling, is at work. That intuition is neither accidental nor exaggerated.
This study proposes to read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland together with its companion work, Through the Looking-Glass, as a coherent literary diptych whose unity lies not so much in narrative continuity as in a shared intellectual concern. Both works function simultaneously as literary fantasy, logical experiment, and cultural critique. They are neither direct political allegories nor topical satires, yet they offer a sustained and penetrating interrogation of language, authority, modern rationality, and the fragility of meaning.
To read Alice attentively is to discover that the central conflict of the narrative is neither physical danger nor moral threat, but something more radical: the experience of inhabiting a world in which words no longer guarantee meaning, rules no longer guarantee justice, and authority no longer feels the need to justify itself.
The Author and the Paradox of His Cultural Position
The author of these works, Lewis Carroll, the literary pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, lived at the very heart of the Victorian world that his books, paradoxically, appear to dismantle from within. A mathematician, logician, and Anglican clergyman, Dodgson was neither a cultural outsider nor a peripheral provocateur. He was, on the contrary, a highly educated representative of the intellectual order of his time.
This fact is essential for an adequate reading of Alice. The work is not a critique written from the margins, but from the centre of a culture that placed profound confidence in reason, order, education, and progress. The absurdity Carroll depicts is not primordial chaos, but the caricature of an order that, when pursued to its extreme, becomes inhuman. Carrollian nonsense does not negate reason; it exposes reason once it has become detached from common sense and from concrete human experience.
Wonderland and the Dissolution of Everyday Logic
In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the reader follows the protagonist in a fall that is both literal and symbolic. By passing through the rabbit-hole, Alice enters a world where physical proportions change without warning, time behaves capriciously, and causality can no longer be relied upon.
What is most striking, however, is that Alice does not passively adapt to this environment. She repeatedly attempts to reason, to recall rules, to apply learned norms. Yet every attempt is frustrated. Rules exist, but they are incoherent; authorities command, but do not explain; sentences are pronounced before trials take place. The problem is not the absence of rules, but their arbitrariness.
Here one of the book’s conceptual cores emerges: the experience of authority without rationality. The Queen of Hearts does not rule because she is right, but because she imposes her will without mediation. Her judgements do not aim at justice, but at the assertion of power. Carroll does not need to depict explicit violence; it is enough to reveal the absurdity of authoritarian exercise to expose it.
The Looking-Glass and the Tyranny of Perfect Order
Through the Looking-Glass does not repeat the structure of the first book; rather, it inverts it. If Wonderland is governed by fluid chaos, the world beyond the mirror is ruled by excessive order. Everything functions according to strict rules, like a chessboard, yet this order does not liberate: it suffocates.
The Red Queen runs without advancing. Characters occupy fixed positions. Alice progresses from square to square, not because she fully comprehends the system, but because she passes through it. The message is subtle but unmistakable: a perfectly regulated world can be just as absurd and dehumanising as a completely chaotic one.
It is in this context that Humpty Dumpty appears, perhaps the most philosophically unsettling character in the entire work. His assertion that words mean whatever he chooses them to mean is not a harmless verbal game. It is a warning. When meaning ceases to be shared and becomes the property of the powerful, language no longer serves truth but domination.
Language, Power, and Modernity
One of Carroll’s greatest achievements lies in his anticipation of a problem that has since become unmistakably familiar: the instrumentalisation of language. In Alice, words fail not through imprecision, but through excess of arbitrariness. They are used to confuse, to impose, to bring conversation to an end.
In this sense, the books do not attack reason itself, but its deformation. Absurdity is not the opposite of order, but its caricature when order has been severed from meaning, reality, and moral responsibility. Carroll seems to suggest that the true danger is not chaos, but an order that has forgotten why it exists.
Political Critique?
At this point, the question inevitably arises: are the Alice books a form of political critique? The answer requires care.
They are not direct political satires. Carroll does not target specific parties, laws, or rulers. Nevertheless, they may be read as a profound cultural critique of the ways in which power operates when it disguises itself as rationality, relies on empty formulae, or uses language as an instrument of domination.
More than political in a strict sense, Alice offers a critique of the authoritarian mindset, one that does not need to be overtly brutal in order to be oppressive, because it has already colonised meaning and neutralised the possibility of genuine dialogue.
Alice as a Figure of Resistance
Alice is not a revolutionary heroine. Nor is she naïve. Her form of resistance is more elemental and, for that very reason, more profound: she persists in questioning, in comparing, in remembering that the world ought to make sense.
Her refusal to accept nonsense as normative is her most subversive act. At the end of both books, the absurd world dissolves not through an external defeat, but because it loses its claim to reality. When Alice ceases to grant it authority, the system collapses.
Conclusion
Read attentively, the Alice books are not escapist, but confrontational. They do not invite flight from the world, but a clearer vision of it. They are a warning wrapped in play, a critique wrapped in fantasy, and an implicit defence of something profoundly human: the need for the world to make sense, and for language to serve truth rather than the other way round.
