Going Once, Going Twice, Going Twelve Times

This blog entry was influenced by this post by Benedikt Kroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a tale full of interesting symbolism and themes. However, how does one determine what the theme of a book is? Could the themes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be things as obvious as the concept of two different worlds, or could they be something as obscure as say, a child’s loss of innocence?

On page 17 of The Annotated Alice, when Alice goes through her first change in size, the tenth annotation states that -

“This is the first of twelve occasions in the book on which Alice alters in size. Richard Ellmann has suggested Carroll may have been unconsciously symbolizing the great disparity between the small Alice whom he loved but could not marry and the large Alice she would soon become.”

I had thought nothing of Alice’s changes in size until reading this annotation. The part of the annotation that struck me was not the part mentioning Carroll however. It was the part stating that there were twelve instances in the book in which there is an instance of change in size for Alice. If something happens twelve times in a story, it clearly has significance and one can assume the author is trying to show you or tell you something. The Annotated Alice’s interpretation of the frequent size changes seems a bit ludicrous to me; marriage with a little girl is a proposition that is not so easily believed. Thankfully, there are other interpretations.

An interpretation by Benedikt Kroll states that “with her [Alice] growing, her perception of the world has changed”. Benedikt goes on to mention the aspects of puberty and the stages between childhood and adulthood. He brings up a very interesting point, the point being that Alice is “saddened by her growth“, like so many other people in the “real” world simply going through the process of growing up.

My personal interpretation deals with the idea that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a full fledged coming of age story, with Alice growing not only physically, represented by the frequent changes in size, but also mentally. Perhaps the size changes also represent how Alice’s mind is growing and accepting new ideas, ideas that would be considered crazy in the world away from her wonderland. The ideas of a talking white rabbit for example, or a grin without a cat, or a riddle that has no answer. Maybe what Carroll was trying to show by integrating not one, not two, but twelve size changes in his tale was that he was showing how Alice herself was growing up to accept new ideas along with the frustrations that come with being a teenager.

Perhaps Gilbert K. Chesterton’s fear has been fully realized and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been over analyzed, and that Carroll never intended for the frequent size changes to represent anything and he just used them as a plot point to entertain little Alice Liddell. But if one were to look at reasons for so many instances of changes in size, then all of these could suffice as explanations.