The real Alice: Lewis Carroll's dream child

Of all Victorian children's stories that are enjoyed equally by children and adults, none is more popular than Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872).1 More than any other piece of literature written for children during the Victorian period, Alice in Wonderland (as the tales together are generally called) has spawned a seemingly never-ending academic industry; and, although Carroll also wrote other children's books (The Hunting of the Snark (1876) and the Sylvie and Bruno books (1889 and 1893) are the most notable), the interest in the Alice books far outweighs the interest in the other books. Alice in Wonderland has been analyzed from virtually all critical points of view.2 The Freudian approach has been applied many times, starting at least as early as 1933 with a piece by A. M. E. Goldschmidt (see Phillips, Aspects of Alice 279-82). Carroll himself receives the Freudian treatment in Phyllis Greenacre's Swift and Carroll: A Psychoanalytic Study of Two Lives (1955). The Jungian approach, too, has been tried on Alice in an article called "Alice as Anima : The Image of Woman in Carroll's Classic," published in Aspects of Alice . Although much that Judith Bloomingdale says is on the mark, she is not convincing in making Alice the anima. Alice may be, for Carroll, an incipient image of the anima, but she is far more, as Bloomingdale herself demonstrates and as I hope my own analysis will show.