Alice begins Through the Looking-Glass as a pawn — the least powerful piece on the chessboard — and ends it as a Queen. On the surface, this is a story of achievement and empowerment: a child advancing through the world and arriving, at last, at authority and recognition. But Carroll’s treatment of this journey is deeply ambivalent. Becoming a Queen does not make Alice happy or secure; it makes her confused, overwhelmed, and ultimately so distressed that she grabs the tablecloth and sends the whole dinner party flying. The novel’s treatment of Alice’s identity raises questions about what it means to grow up, what adults expect from children, and whether maturity is something to be desired or feared.

Who Is Alice? The Problem of Self

Questions about identity run through both Alice books, but they are more sharply focused in Through the Looking-Glass. From the very first chapter, Alice is troubled by the question of selfhood. She wonders whether the kitten is actually the Red Queen in disguise, whether she herself might be a character in someone else’s dream, and — most disturbingly — whether she even has a stable self at all.

The novel places Alice in a world where identity is constantly threatened. In the nameless forest, she forgets who she is. When she becomes a Queen, she is immediately subjected to an examination she has not prepared for, asked questions she cannot answer, given rules she does not understand. The acquisition of status does not come with wisdom, clarity, or comfort. It comes with new and more demanding forms of confusion.

Carroll seems to be making an observation about childhood and socialization: children are expected to move through stages toward adult identity, but the adult world they are moving toward is itself arbitrary, contradictory, and exhausting. The Looking-Glass world’s rules are not more rational than a child’s imagination — they are just enforced with more authority.

Alice and the Adult Characters: A Power Dynamic

Throughout the novel, Alice interacts with a series of adult figures — the Queens, the Knight, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledee and Tweedledum — who are by turns patronizing, baffling, and unhelpful. Almost none of them take Alice seriously as an interlocutor. They talk at her, correct her, interrupt her, and dismiss her questions.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” cried Humpty Dumpty. “How many days are there in a year?”
“Three hundred and sixty-five,” said Alice.
“And how many birthdays have you?”
“One.”
“And if you take one from three hundred and sixty-five what remains?”
“Three hundred and sixty-four, of course.”
Humpty Dumpty looked doubtful. “I’d rather see that done on paper,” he said.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

This is a recognizable social dynamic: an adult challenges a child’s straightforward, correct answer, not because the answer is wrong, but because the adult wants to maintain the upper hand. Alice’s experience in the Looking-Glass world is full of moments like this — moments where being right is not enough, where the rules of conversation consistently disadvantage her. Carroll, who spent much of his life in the company of children and was famously uncomfortable with adult social conventions himself, seems to have genuine sympathy for Alice’s position.

The White Queen and Red Queen as Models of Femininity

The two Queens Alice encounters offer contrasting models of adult womanhood that are both, in different ways, unsatisfactory. The White Queen is helpless, scattered, and constantly in distress — she screams before she pricks her finger, cannot manage her own hair, and seems to exist in a permanent state of anxious incompetence. The Red Queen is authoritarian, rigid, and obsessed with protocol and correctness. Neither presents a model of adulthood that Alice could aspire to.

Victorian scholars have read both Queens as gentle satires of Victorian ideals of femininity: the White Queen parodies the ideal of fragile, dependent womanhood, while the Red Queen parodies the ideal of the stern, morally commanding woman (a governess figure, or a strict maternal authority). By exaggerating both types to absurdity, Carroll implicitly questions the narrow range of roles available to women and girls in his era.

Alice herself does not fit neatly into either model. She is curious, direct, morally confident, and intellectually engaged — qualities that the Looking-Glass world consistently fails to reward. Her eventual crowning as Queen feels less like a triumph than a trap: she is now expected to inhabit an identity (the Queen) that the novel has already shown to be ridiculous.

The Final Rebellion

The novel’s climax is one of the most cathartic moments in Victorian children’s literature. Alice, newly crowned as Queen, is subjected to a chaotic dinner party that spirals entirely out of control. Guests appear uninvited, candles grow to the ceiling, bottles take seats at the table. Unable to bear it any longer, Alice seizes the tablecloth and pulls everything down:

“I can’t stand this any longer!” she cried, as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

This act of rebellion — brief, impulsive, and immediately followed by Alice’s return to the real world — is significant. It suggests that the Looking-Glass world’s version of adult authority is ultimately intolerable. Alice does not gracefully ascend to Queenhood; she destroys the institution the moment she fully enters it. Whether we read this as liberating or simply as an escape into waking life is open to interpretation.

Childhood as a Critical Lens

Carroll uses Alice’s childlike perspective not simply for comic effect but as a critical instrument. A child, unaccustomed to adult social rituals, asks why things are done the way they are. She does not accept conventions as natural or inevitable. In Through the Looking-Glass, this childlike questioning exposes the arbitrariness of adult authority, social convention, and even language itself.

For students of literature, the figure of the child as a critical lens is a significant one. It appears in Romantic poetry (William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience), in realist fiction (Dickens’s orphaned protagonists), and in modernist writing. Carroll’s Alice is an important early instance of this tradition: a child whose innocence is not naïveté but a form of clear-sightedness that adults, mired in convention, have lost.

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Key Terms

• Identity: In literary and philosophical terms, the coherent sense of self — who we are, how we are recognized, how we recognize ourselves.
• Socialization: The process by which individuals learn the norms, rules, and roles of the society they belong to.
• Satire: A literary mode that uses humour, irony, or exaggeration to criticize and expose human folly or social institutions.
• The child as critical lens: A narrative strategy in which a child character’s naïve or outsider perspective is used to defamiliarize and critique adult social norms.
• Victorian ideals of femininity: The cultural norms of Carroll’s era that defined women primarily through qualities like domesticity, passivity, moral purity, and dependence.

Discussion Questions

1. Does Alice’s journey from Pawn to Queen feel like a genuine achievement in the novel, or is it more like a trap? Support your answer with evidence from the text.
2. How do the White Queen and Red Queen function as satirical types? What aspects of Victorian femininity does each parody?
3. Alice ultimately destroys the dinner party rather than presiding over it as a Queen. What does this act of rebellion suggest about Carroll’s attitude toward adult authority and social convention?