260 Carroll, Lewis
staGes OF liFe in Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
Although a Victorian-era fantasy, Lewis Carroll’s
children’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
illustrates—albeit rather covertly—the stages of life,
especially in relation to childhood and adolescence.
The novel opens with what has become an iconic
set of circumstances: Seven-year-old prepubescent
Alice’s inquisitiveness leads her to follow a white
rabbit down a hole into a magical realm permeated
by nonsense and irrationality, Wonderland. While
the act of jumping down a rabbit hole into another
dimension certainly signifies the onset of change,
even more significant are the personal changes that
Alice undergoes during her stay in Wonderland.
Early on her journey, Alice spies a beautiful,
enchanting garden through a small doorway, which
she cannot enter due to her size. Alice cries, lament-
ing being denied access to the garden because she
is too big. However, this denial also functions as a
deeper type of refusal, signifying that Alice is no
longer permitted access to the bastion of edenic
innocence, the garden. Struggling to maintain her
connection to her childhood innocence, Alice uses
the only available resources to try to adjust her size:
a bottle labeled “drink me” and a cake marked “eat
me.” Proving that while she may be curious, she is
at least endowed with a modicum of common sense
that places her on the verge of adulthood, Alice is
initially cautious about drinking from the bottle.
According to the novel:
It was all very well to say to say “Drink me,”
but the wise little Alice was not going to do
that in a hurry. “No, I’ll look first,” she said,
“and see whether it is marked ‘poison’ or not.”... However, this bottle was not marked “poi-
son,” so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding
it very nice (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed fla-
vour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast
turkey, toffy, and hot buttered toast), she very
soon finished it off.
Yet, despite Alice’s rather courageous efforts—drink-
ing an atrocious-sounding concoction and consum-
ing a cake made with mysterious ingredients—she
is still unable to access the garden. Her fluctuations
in size suggest that while she cannot enter the realm
of paradisiacal innocence, she is also not yet ready to
enter adulthood. Therefore, although Alice is only
a precocious seven-year-old, Wonderland (and her
adventures while there) apparently function as the
catalyst for the onset of Alice’s adolescence.
Throughout the rest of the novel, Alice uses food
and drink to try to manage her uncontrollable size,
but she begins to understand just how to regulate
the fluctuations from a hookah-smoking caterpillar
who offers Alice a tidbit of wisdom about mush-
rooms: “One side will make you grow taller, and
the other side will make you grow shorter.” It seems
rather significant that Alice gets such advice from a
type of creature who will undergo a metamorphosis,
similar to the one that Alice is experiencing, when
the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly. When the
caterpillar leaves Alice alone, however, she consumes
part of the mushroom, and her neck stretches so
long that a pigeon attacks her, assuming that she is
after its eggs. These episodes in Alice’s adventures
are noteworthy, as both the caterpillar and the eggs
could be representative of the burgeoning fertility
and sense of new life that accompanies adolescence.
And it does not seem to be coincidence that
all of these incidents related to Alice’s changing
size coincide with her continual questioning of her
identity, another motif within the novel. From the
very beginning of Alice’s adventures in Wonder-
land, she starts to question who and what she is,
as do each of the Wonderland denizens that she
encounters. When Alice meets the caterpillar, the
one who shows her how to boldly yet shrewdly con-
trol her size, she still has to figure out how to alter
her person appropriately, according to occasion and
circumstance, on her own. However, once she starts
learning, she also becomes more confident in her
identity and abilities:How puzzling all these changes are! I’m never
sure what I’m going to be, from one minute to
another! However, I’ve got to get back to my
right size: the next thing is, to get into that
beautiful garden—how is that to be done, I
wonder?