Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) | Mark Conroy (essay date 1991)

Mark Conroy (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: "A Tale of Two Alices in Wonderland," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXVII, No. 3, 1991, pp. 29-44.

[In the following essay, which focuses on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Conroy discusses the connections between Alice's identity as a middle-class Victorian child and her dream experiences,.]

Thanks to the Freudian moment in modern literary criticism, it has been for years quite permissible to view the dream world presented to the reader in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as if it in fact bore some relation to actual dream structures and significances. While some have traced such structures rather hastily to the author's own psychology (a not inexplicable move given what is known of the author, perhaps), the more fruitful vein of inquiry has focussed rather upon the oneiric quality within the text itself, and has revealed its kinship with the mechanisms Sigmund Freud...

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