If the chess metaphor whereby Alice the pawn becomes a queen can be interpreted as representing this passage into adulthood, the fact that both Queens deem Alice unsuitable to be a queen like them: she’s not ready, Carroll is perhaps saying. When Alice finds herself between the White Queen and the Red Queen at the end of Through the Looking-Class, it’s tempting to see this as Carroll’s veiled way of referring to Alice’s passage from childhood into adulthood, with white connoting purity and innocence, and red carrying its well-known connotations of sin, the flesh, and even menstruation. And it’s well-known that Lewis Carroll was fond of Alice Liddell and other young girls (and how innocent, or otherwise, his feelings towards them were has been the subject of analysis and debate ever since). The ‘wasp in a wig’ is thought to be a play on the more usual phrase, ‘having a bee in one’s bonnet’.Īs a masterpiece of nonsense literature, it’s perhaps unwise to analyse Through the Looking-Glass too closely in search of deeper meanings and subtexts, although it’s certainly true that aspects of the novel can be made to resonate with Freudian significance (Carroll was writing before Freud, but psychoanalysis encourages us to go back and read classic works of literature with an awareness of the Freudian unconscious and how it operates). It was finally published nearly 120 years after the book first appeared.
Carroll took out this section from the book before its publication, possibly because his illustrator, John Tenniel, couldn’t ‘see way to a picture’ (according to a letter Tenniel wrote to Carroll in June 1870). If you’ve ever used the words ‘chortle’ or ‘galumph’, or encountered the linguistic term ‘ portmanteau word’, or the phrase ‘jam tomorrow but never jam today’, or the idea of ‘being through the looking-glass now’, you’re dealing with the legacy of Through the Looking-Glass.Ĭuriously, one chapter of the novel, featuring a wasp in a wig, remained unpublished until 1990. Through the Looking-Glass has embedded itself within the popular consciousness, and even the everyday language we use, more than pretty much any other single work of children’s literature – indeed, even more so than the novel it was a sequel to, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
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