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Unnati Singh
Professor Apoorva Dimri
Popular Literature
21 November 2021
Reality and Fantasy in “Through the Looking-Glass”
In Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, Alice enters a fantastical world inside a
mirror where everything is reversed. One of the main motifs of the book is the intersection of
reality and fantasy and it is very difficult to distinguish between the two in a book which is
set in the context of a dream. The Looking Glass world with its chaos and strangeness
parodies the real world. In other words, it shows a growing child that the real world is not so
different from the fantastical world and in many ways the crookedness of the real world is
greater. The Looking Glass world therefore becomes a spoof, where Alice can begin to
navigate the real world without actually having to face it.
Alice is still reminded of the real world in her dreamy fantasy. When it comes to nursery
rhymes, Alice’s memory works very well, and the “old song” about Tweedledum and
Tweedledee keeps “ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock” (Carroll 157).
Carroll’s anxiety regarding memory is seen as the memories of real life can easily ruin the
fantasy created in the dream. In the fantastical world, “Alice’s memory is both a tool Carroll
must use and a threat to his power” (Morton 15).
The character of White Knight represents the author Carroll and his compassionate
behaviour towards fictional Alice demonstrates Carroll’s feelings toward the real-life Alice
Liddell. The White Knight rescues Alice in a moment of crisis and escorts her safely to the
eighth square so that she can become the queen. As he guides her, he sings a song that
conjures up feelings of longing, calling attention to the idea of Alice’s transformation into a
queen as a metaphor for her ending childhood. “Of all the strange things . . . this was the one
that she always remembered most clearly” shows the significance of the White Knight in
Alice’s life (Carroll 214).
The undercurrent of Carroll’s nostalgia makes the intersection of reality and fantasy
even more compelling. The poems about the boat trip show that the Alice books are not just a
story about childhood fantasy but it has its roots in reality and expresses a deep longing for
the past. “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky” shows Carroll's sense of the fleetingness of his
relationship with Alice Liddell, who is growing up as fast as Alice’s dream fades away into
reality in the book. For Carroll nostalgia for childhood is “a means of detachment and retreat
from the adult world” which leads to a “dreaming denial of the reality of life” (Morton 4).
Carroll too comes close to his childhood when he writes the book. He tries to escape the
realities of his adult life and is nostalgic and wants to return to his fantastical childhood. Here
we see how childhood itself becomes a fantasy for the adults.
In Through the Looking Glass, the crisis of identity and existence is certainly explicit.
Tweedledum and Tweedledee show Alice the sleeping Red King and tell her that he is
dreaming of her. They repeatedly tell her that she is “only a sort of thing in his dream”
(Carroll 165). To this Alice replies “I am real”, until Alice is reduced to tears by the repeated
insistence that she is unreal (165). Shires says, “It is as if the narrator and the narrator's
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gentle, loving voice have crossed over some boundary between reality and fiction, between
Alice's adventures and Carroll's telling of them” (14).
The final question of the book is “who it was that dreamed it all?” Alice or the Red
King, “He was part of my dream, of course - but then I was part of his dream, too!” (Carroll
239,240). This is followed by a poem, which ends with, “Life, what is it but a dream?”
(241). The lines between dream and life, fantasy and reality are blurred through this question.
The acrostic in the poem forms the name of the real Alice. Reality intersects with fantasy in
this reminder of an actual person.
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Works cited
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Penguin
Classics, 1998
Shires, Linda M. “Fantasy, Nonsense, Parody, and the Status of the Real: The Example of
Carroll.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 26, no. 3, West Virginia University Press, 1988, pp. 267–83,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001965.

Morton, Lionel. “Memory in the Alice Books.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 33, no. 3,
University of California Press, 1978, pp. 285–308, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933016.